Is Shia-Sunni Violence on the Rise? Exploring New Data on Intra-Muslim Organised Violence 1989-2017

ABSTRACT

This data study provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of organised violence across the Shia and Sunni Muslim divide, 1989–2017. We present a conceptual framework of sectarian dimensions of armed conflicts: sectarian identities; sectarian ideologies; and sectarian alliances. Our analysis demonstrates the extent to which organised violence has been fought across the Shia-Sunni divide. We also explore the sectarian identity dimension in non-state armed conflicts and one-sided violence. Overall, our study shows that most of the organised violence across the Shia-Sunni divide is driven by states, rebel groups, and militias, rather than communities.

Acknowledgments

This article is written within the research project “Resolving Jihadist Conflicts? Religion, Civil War, and Prospects for Peace”. We gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond through grant NHS14-1701:1. An earlier version was submitted to Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and presented at the workshop “Mapping Sunni-Shi‘i Relations in Europe”, 7–9 June 2018, University of Gothenburg. We thank participants for comments. We thank Bitte Hammargren, Emin Poljarevic, and Lars Eslev Andersen for valuable comments and insights. We are also grateful to Dino Krause, Kaitlin McGarvey and Jasper Peet-Martel for excellent research assistance. Finally, we thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of Civil Wars for their excellent feedback which helped to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The data used for this article is made freely and publically available at http://files.webb.uu.se/uploader/1576/Replication-Data.xlsx.

2. In the present study, we limit ourselves to apply this threefold framework only to state-based conflicts, where information about issues, ideologies, demands, and alliances are more accessable. Future research should try to expand this framework also to the categories of non-state conflicts and one-sided violence.

3. The two largest branches within Shia Islam are the so-called Ithna Asharia and the Ismailis, more commonly called the Twelvers and the Seveners (Shepard 2008:226).

4. In Toft’s dataset, for religion to count as central, combatants have to be fighting over whether the state or a region of the state should be ruled according to a specific religious tradition, e.g., Afghanistan, Chad, Sudan. For religion to count as peripheral, combatants have to identify with a specific religious tradition and group themselves accordingly, but the rule of a specific religious tradition cannot be the object of contention, e.g., the conflict in former Yugoslavia between Bosnian Muslims (Islam), Croats (Catholicism), and Serbs (Orthodox Christianity) (Toft 2007:97).

5. Whereas the study by Pearce (2005) examines the intensity of conflict, it is restricted to only territorial conflicts.

6. The UCDP uses both the aggregate and disaggregate measures of conflict.

7. The UCDP conflict descriptions can be accessed at ucdp.uu.se.

8. Note that the organisation we now know as IS (or ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) went under several different names in the early stages of the studied time period: Jamaat al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad became al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004 which became the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006. Yet, since we we rely on the UCDP database, which uses the term ‘IS’ for the whole time period 2004–2017, we also do so consistently throughout this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [NHS14-1701:1].