Religious meanings and concerns have had a prominent role in a wide variety of political conflicts in recent decades. After the Six-Day War in 1967, for example, religious Zionists interpreted Israel’s victory in explicitly religious terms and saw Israeli occupation of the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank and of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as evidence that the divine redemption of the Jewish people was at hand. Muslims, in contrast, saw Israeli occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem as a threat to al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred compound atop the Temple Mount and one of Islam’s most revered sites. Radical Islamists have cast many other conflicts in religious terms, including the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, the civil war in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and the conflict between Chechen separatists and Russia that started in the mid-1990s. Interpreting these conflicts as attacks on the global Muslim community, radicals from various Muslim countries took up arms in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya in defense of Islam. Out of these contexts, al-Qaeda emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as a transstate terrorist army that focuses on more dispersed, symbolic targets in its war against Western antagonists. On a regional scale, tensions between India and Pakistan have contained an overt religious dimension since independence, exacerbated by the rising influence of Hindu and Muslim fundamentalisms in the region. This religious dimension found symbolic expression in the late 1980s and 1990s through military nomenclature, with Pakistani missile systems that bore names linked to the early Muslim conquests of northern India (Ghauri, Ghaznavi), and India’s deployment of missile systems named after principal Vedic deities (Agni, Surya) and a Hindu hero in the wars against Muslim conquest (Prithvi). In Africa, political violence has arisen in various states out of postcolonial competition among traditional animists, Muslims, and Christians. In Sudan, for example, conflict between the Muslim majority in the north and animist and Christian minorities in the south has provoked a devastating civil war. These examples illustrate the persistent complexity of the intersection of religious meanings and war.
The Longitudinal Effects of Chronic Mediated Exposure to Political Violence on Ideological Beliefs About Political Conflicts Among Youths