(This event is organised by MEI’s Political Economy Research Cluster, as part of its quarterly public talks series.)

Abstract

Tensions, conflict, altérité, violence. Our current age seems to be afflicted by all of these. Increasingly these differences leading to discord are justified, motivated and promoted in the name of religious difference. Analysts squabble about the causes of the conflict and the competition ranging from an insistence upon reducing the process of differences to economic and structural reasons to the more theological, seeking to find the roots in resurgent religious identities and political theologies. However, far too many analysts looking at the Middle East and beyond point to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and much more as an explosion of age old sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shii communities that characterises the conflict. Religion as cause and explanation. But sectarianism is not an explanation. Nor is religion a simple solution. Much like forms of ethno-political conflict in the current world, we can look at how sectarianisation is a political process formed in the struggle for power, status, and scarce resources.

In this presentation, I will examine this process of sectarianisation in line with existing modern theories of political action and suggest how we can unite various accounts within a unified theory that does not reduce difference to conflict, nor seek a futile solution in religious and ethnic analysis. Just as the question of studying Islam in the current age is not sui generis requiring some unique analytical tools so too is the conflict, defined in religious terms in the Gulf, South Asia and elsewhere, compared to other situations and processes, not least those used to make sense of communalists and communalised politics globally.