Sacred Time and Conflict Initiation

Abstract

This article examines the manner in which rituals and symbols associated with sacred time have influenced conflict initiation. Leaders will time their attacks with sacred dates in the religious calendar if the force multiplying effects of sacred time, motivation, and vulnerability, outweigh its force dividing effects, constraint, and outrage. This is most likely to occur under three conditions: When conflict occurs across religious divides, when the sacred day is unambiguous in significance and meaning, and when rituals connected to that day will undermine an opponents' military effectiveness. I illustrate these effects with twentieth century examples, including the timing of insurgent attacks in Iraq and the launching of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. By exploring the pervasive effects of religious calendars on modern combat, I hope to redirect the focus of the study of religion and violence away from the narrow preoccupation with fundamentalism and terrorism and onto the much broader range of cases in which religion shapes secular conflict in multiple-and often unexpected-ways.

Islamists and Nationalists: Rebel Motivation and Counterinsurgency in Russia's North Caucasus

“…Beliefs may also explain the timing of violence. As Hassner (2011, 496–97) notes, religious holidays entail date-specific rituals and prohibitions, allowing believers to “communicate with the divine, and to receive divine favors.” By synchronizing attacks with “sacred dates” on a religious calendar, combatants can signal knowledge and commitment to faith, bask in the reflected glory of historical battles, or amplify sectarian divisions. Because different dates carry different meanings for different actors, holiday-specific increases in violence should vary across groups.…”

Can Countries Buy Their Way Out of Insurgencies? Evidence from Iraq.

“…To establish preliminary empirical evidence that Pr (Z = c) = Pr (Z = c ), I regress D t−2,i on Z t−2,i using U.S. military contracting data related to the conflict in Afghanistan for fiscal years '07 and '08 and again find that α 1 > 0, (P < 0.0061). Yet, recent research by Hassner [2011] challenges this widely held notion: "Islamic insurgents in Iraq have not exploited the Ramadan season to escalate their attacks on coalition troops and Shia opponents, despite the motivating effects of the sacred month, due to the outrage that such timing would provoke among potential Muslim supporters outside Iraq." "[T]he belief that violence in Iraq has escalated during Ramadan rests on shaky statistical grounds," at least when considered alongside other religious holidays: Coalition forces may have detected "consistent escalations of sectarian and insurgent attacks during Ramadan but those escalations were neither statistically significant nor unique to Ramadan" [Hassner, 2011].…”

Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence

“…Toft and Zhukov’s (2015) prediction that Islamic holidays increase violence, by creating focal-points allowing militant groups to better coordinate activity, similarly presumes a baseline level of ongoing conflict. Hassner’s (2011) framework of incentives and constraints on violence during religious holidays, although agnostic on the primary direction of effect, nonetheless presumes that the root motivations for conflict are exogenous to sacred time. Our contribution is to make this heretofore unacknowledged structural moderator logic, found across the literature, explicit.…”

“…Other scholars find the opposite. Hassner (2011) and Medina, Siebeneck, and Hepner (2011) find that violence does not significantly change, or that it even declines, on Ramadan and other Islamic holidays in Iraq. Since these disparate findings could easily result from different cases, dependent variables, operationalizations of significant religious time, and estimation techniques, the overall effect is that empirical truth behind the popular wisdom—that the main effect of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence—remains poorly understood.…”

“…To date, Hassner (2011) offers the best conceptual framework to understand the countervailing incentives for violence generated by religious holidays. According to Hassner, the likelihood that an armed actor will attack on a holiday increases “if the force multiplying effects of sacred time, motivation, and vulnerability, outweigh its force dividing effects, constraint, and outrage” (Hassner 2011, 491). However, the framework makes no concrete predictions about which factors—multipliers or dividers—are likely to prevail in any given case.…”