Book Notes: When God Stops Fighting

 

When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends by Mark Juergensmeyer. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 196 pp.

In this monograph, Mark Juergensmeyer examines how “violent movements, even those informed by relgious visions of great warfare, terminate, or are transformed into more peaceful elements within the broader society.” The author focuses on movements that are related to religion because the participants in these movements often consider their struggle a holy crusade, in which they are engaged in a metaphysical struggle between good and evil, right and wrong. The author terms these struggles a kind of “cosmic war” to underline the high degree of importance and the deep meaning that the people involved perceive their efforts. Thus, the aim of the study is to understand how conflicts are resolved as well as to decipher when the idea of fighting begins to cease in the mind of the participants.  

In this book, Juergensmeyer studies three particular  cases – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Mindanao Muslims in the Philippines, and the Khalistan movement by Sikhs in India’s Punjab region. The author travelled extensively to these places in order to interview individuals involved in these struggles in various capacities including former soldiers, leaders, and sympathizers, etc. Undoubtedly, these trips were full of risks to the author’s own life.  

From these three case studies, Juergensmeyer shows that not only the struggles themselves are complex involving multiple reasons – religion, ethnic, political, economic – the reasons that these violent movements come to an end are also complex. The author divides the set of factors into two categories – external and internal. The external factors include outside intervention, i.e., by government military forces that debilitate the movement’s ability to persist. When bases are destroyed and resources are limited, movements begin to lose their steam.

Internally, movements lose their strength due to internal conflicts. Sometimes, members become disenchanted due to poor leadership and discredits and devalues the movement which is meant to be a divine mandate. The internal disagreements lead to a loss of faith in the movement’s vision, fractures in the communal consensus, and the awareness of altenative opportunities that provide new hope. In the last situation, former enemies can begin to see themselves as allies who recognize and respect the needs of one another.

While there is an end in the conflict, there is no guarantee that there is complete cessation of violence. Some level of activities continues to be carried out by those in the movement who are not satisfied with the peace agreement or when agreements are not implemented as initially articulated. For many, the idea of “cosmic war” does not entirely dissipate even if there is apparent peace. The cosmic war could be revived when individuals feel shortchanged in their effort to accommodate themselves to civil society. Therefore, ongoing work is needed to maintain the peace and to manage the potential for reignition of the cosmic war. To this end, close collaboration with former true believers in a movement’s cosmic war would be essential keeping coflict at bay.