a2c986685738921c…

Preprint
ID: 5d7faeeae3ac4400123826112,671 bytesFirst seen Jun 24, 20261 collection

Fields

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abstractWhy do ordinary individuals participate in political campaigns involving mass looting, killings, and enslavement against members of another religious group? This paper argues that religious justifications of violence have a stronger appeal when they target liminal minorities whose beliefs and norms remain illegible in the eyes of a majority religion. It then formulates a series of alternative hypotheses about the role of greed, threat, resentment, and guilt in the motives of perpetrators and uses the self-styled Islamic State (IS) campaign against Yezidis in 2014 as a case study to test these hypotheses . Empirical evidence comes from extensive fieldwork including dozens of in-depth interviews with Yezidi survivors and others in Iraqi Kurdistan. The analysis reveals that religious beliefs were necessary both for making extreme levels of violence permissible and for mobilizing local population to participate in the atrocities.
abstractViews1092
approvedDate2019-09-18T14:40:43.911Z
assetFileNameTezcurAPSA2019.pdf
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doi10.33774/apsa-2019-pfkft
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publishedDate2019-09-18T14:40:43.926Z
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statusDate2019-09-18T14:40:43.926Z
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submittedDate2019-09-17T17:32:20.559Z
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titleRevisiting the Religious Violence Thesis: Minorities in the Middle East
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cambridge-up/open-engage1 version · Jun 24, 2026

Full hash:a2c986685738921c63bae7fe5f2dcbd920bbe3a6f80f785b2309d927b2597f5b