God, the state, and war: Toward a containment strategy for religious militancy (Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Germany)

This dissertation explores the nature of religious militancy---in particular, the mechanics of the decision that a potential militant makes to embrace or reject violence in pursuit of his or her aims.; To situate this project, it is worth comparing it to the two general sets of approaches from which religious conflict is usually assessed: "essentialist" approaches that prioritize the role of religious identity as a motivation for conflict, and "reductionist" approaches that seek to explain seemingly religious conflict in other, non-religious terms.; By contrast, the argument of the dissertation is that both the reductionist and essentialist sets of approaches are insufficient explanations for the phenomenon of religious violence, and an analytical framework is proposed that explains the criteria by which each general set of approaches predicts the existence of militancy. The key elements of this synthesis are simple: perceptions matter, and the process of perception is not automatic. Potential militants are cognitive misers who must make do with less-than-complete information in making their decisions. On the essentialist side of the equation, the process of understanding the teachings of a centuries-old text, organizing them into a cognitive framework, and applying them to the details of daily life is not a simple one, and one can identify many intervening variables in this process---differences in hermeneutical method, doctrinal emphases, and clerical teachings all play a role. On the reductionist side, similarly, one cannot assume that a potential militant accurately apprehends the true situation he or she is facing, and thus the perceptions of underlying social, political, or economic reality are frequently more useful than the realities themselves at explaining this question of militancy.; The second part of the dissertation is comprised of two full-length case studies (the Bosnian civil war and the militant wing of the American anti-abortion movement) and three smaller exploratory cases (Northern Ireland, Nazi Germany, and the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth-century United States), which combine historical process-tracing with a variety of other methodologies to trace the specific relationship between "traditional" reductionist and essentialist factors in each case.