KILLING HUNDREDS of people in the name of “cow protection” would, at first glance, appear to be a headline drawn from a Monty Python skit. Instead, it is a political problem of the first order in India. Since the 2014 election of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), hardly a week has gone by without some incident involving emboldened cow-protection vigilantes. All this is despite a fact that rarely gets attention in the bewildered international coverage: India is consistently among the world’s top exporters of beef, with a nearly 20 percent share of the world market in 2016.

How can it be that one of the world’s top exporters of beef is a country where people are subject to organized violence supported by a major political party and civil-society organizations in the name of cow protection? Is this really religious violence—and, if so, in what sense is it “religious”? Why do “religious” conflicts tend to generate high levels of symbolic and physical violence? And how do “religious” conflicts compare to other categories of conflict in general?

AT THE outset it is important to note that “religious violence” refers to a phenomenon much broader, deeper and more ancient than current usage implies. It can also refer to ritual violence in service of a relationship with some aspect of the supernatural. In this sense, “religious violence” is entirely apolitical, in that it serves what could be considered to be a narrow ritual purpose, binding a supplicant to a divine force or being, in the expectation that a satisfactory offering of blood will induce the reciprocal granting of wishes requested by the supplicant. This “contractual” religious function, offering that which is most precious (blood) in exchange for divine patronage, is entirely normal anthropologically speaking and is, presumably, the most ancient and pervasive form of religious violence. It is likely that in the very ancient past human sacrifice, as the bogs of northern Europe often reveal, was normal. Indeed, echoes of human sacrifice remained a part of Roman religion well into the historical era (for example, gladiatorial combat began as funeral games, in which the exercise of violence for a religious purpose was explicit, aside from its evident entertainment value). Other examples from the more recent past include the Aztecs’ well-known industrial-scale practice of blood sacrifice.

Much of what is properly termed “religious violence” is either entirely apolitical, as in the case of animal sacrifice, or, as in the case of human sacrifice, is at least not inherently political. The exercise of ritual violence in service of a narrow religious goal is an entirely normal part of religious history. This is type of religious violence is nonconflictual and is, for this reason, by definition apolitical. The question, therefore, that faces the modern world is not about “religious violence” per se, but instead about religious conflict that leads to violence. Or, in slightly less unwieldy terms, it is about violence that occurs at the intersection of religion and politics.

WAR, AS Clausewitz correctly observed, is a political process. It is an intensification of political violence to achieve some goal. War, as a concept, encompasses a limited (but critical) set of interactions that involve the addition of organized violence to the normal tools of political competition. War can be defined, therefore, as a social relationship in which violence is one of the mechanisms used to adjudicate outcomes. Consequently, to understand war is by definition to understand the social relationships in play.

Wars occur when at least one actor in a political relationship seeks to change the status quo. The operative word here is change: when attempts to change the status quo meet resistance and political actors deploy violence as an additional means of negotiation, war ensues. This raises the question of what precisely, in theoretical language, can change in a political relationship. Political conflicts can be either about the relative rank and status of the actors under stable institutional configurations (groups’ “balance-of-power hierarchy”) or about the rules that govern said rank and status (i.e., institutions themselves).

Conflicts over relative rank and status within an accepted hierarchical structure are a normal part of human history. These are conflicts between like units, concerning where each member of the group ranks among the others. The classic examples of these systems are ancient Greece, Europe between the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution, and then Europe again in the long nineteenth century. In a system of like units, conflict will be about the rankings of those units. It is very rare in balance-of-power systems for units to disappear entirely. For that to happen, some other logic of conflict has to be in operation. In ancient Greece, for example, while Sparta and Athens fought the bitterly long Peloponnesian War, the conflict did not end with the disappearance of Athens—only with a change in its internal governing institutions (i.e., oligarchy versus democracy) to make it less threatening to Sparta. Similarly, during the classical period of balance of power from 1648 to 1789, the only polity to wholly disappear was the Kingdom of Poland. In both of these examples (as well as the long nineteenth century) conflicts could lead to changes in the boundaries of polities, but almost never to their actual disappearance. Indeed, it was the breakdown of this logic of political conflict after 1789 that made the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars so terribly violent and shocking to those, such as Clausewitz, who experienced them. Nothing like these conflicts had been experienced before in Europe (although elsewhere wars between Europeans and non-Europeans, in which losing parties saw the disappearance of their polities, were the norm).

Social systems—including societies of states—that use violence as a mechanism to determine relative rank and status will generate violence that is frequent, but limited in scale and scope. The reason has to do with the nature of domination in balance-of-power systems. Dominant entities seek maximum gains for minimum expenditure of resources, and violence is an inherently risky undertaking. If actors can achieve dominance and high status without the risks and expenditures associated with violence, then they will: violence only becomes a necessity if there is some dispute over the ranking system, and if violence is accepted as a legitimate mechanism to resolve disputes of this nature.

Conflict that seeks to maximize domination for minimal cost requires, by definition, a basic acceptance of the rules of the game by those engaged in the conflict. Therefore, such conflicts can only occur between individuals (or groups) that are fundamentally equal. This basic equality implies a level of trust that the players will accept the outcomes of violent competition as legitimate, and will not seek to use illegitimate forms of competition to advance their interests, because to do so would make the benefits of victory and the consequences of defeat uncertain and insecure. Put differently, this kind of conflict can only occur under stable institutional conditions where all concerned share limited goals and agree that a particular form of violence is a legitimate mechanism for conflict resolution. The entire structure of international relations since 1945 has sought to reserve conflict for legitimate units (states recognized by other states), using specific forms of conflict resolution to establish their relative rank and status. Predictably, we have seen few, if any, legitimate polities disappear due to conquest.

INSTITUTIONS CAN be understood as society’s sources of legitimate power configuration: they incentivize human behavior by providing templates of behavior to be followed, and by constraining and channeling behavior through enforcement mechanisms. Institutions’ power lies in their ability to affect individual behavior and associated outcomes. Changing institutional configurations requires overcoming the resistance of those who have vested interests in the status quo. A conflict over some aspect of the rules of a society is more than a conflict involving the specific individuals in a ranking system; it is about the nature of the ranking system itself. These conflicts involve the very nature of social order and therefore can, in some sense, be understood as “constitutional” in nature. This is precisely why the French Revolutionary Wars were so horribly violent: the French state demanded the elimination of the entire system of dynastic politics that then prevailed in Europe. There was, in effect, nothing to negotiate about.

Conflicts that involve an attempt to change some aspect of the institutional structure of society will meet with greater resistance, because what is at stake involves more vested interests. Why this should be the case has, again, to do with the nature of institutions. Institutions do not exist in isolation from one another, but instead in an entangling web with others. When challenges to the status quo are sufficiently threatening, the stakes are raised, as are the levels of mobilization and its consequent expression in resistance and violence. This implies that unlike limited conflict over rank and status, conflicts that involve the institutional structure of society by definition involve actors who reject their opponents’ fundamental equality.

Unlike limited conflicts over rank and status, conflicts over institutional arrangements can be set along a continuum defined by the strength of a given challenge to the existing social order. Conflicts about religion tend to be at the more intense end of the continuum; those involving rulers and representative bodies more towards the middle; and those involving the precise configuration of property rights more towards the lower end. What all these conflicts have in common is that they tend to be harder to resolve, result in greater degrees of mobilization, and are characterized by more symbolic and physical violence.

Religious conflict involves some aspect of the rules governing social order. In this sense, the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were not principally caused by prejudice, bigotry, or intolerance per se; they were instead a consequence of differences over how authority was to be constructed in Latin Christendom, and with what consequences. The Protestant Reformation was a revolutionary movement in the sense that it sought not just changes in the doctrines and rituals of the Catholic Church, but also, and more importantly for our purposes, fundamental changes in society’s overall power relations. Similarly, what makes ISIS a revolutionary movement is that it seeks to reorder social institutions internally within the Sunni Arab world, and just as significantly, it is rejecting basic frameworks of contemporary international relations. In this sense, the source of the revolutionary impulse is less significant than its consequences for the current institutional status quo, both within Sunni Arab society (tribes, states, etc.) and the international system itself (the UN, the international monetary system, etc.). We have seen, in relatively recent history, revolutionary movements engaging in the precise analytical categories of behavior being discussed here—most significantly and ominously, the Bolshevik and fascist movements in the early- to mid-twentieth centuries.

In the cases of both ISIS and the Bolsheviks, a set of first-order principles (Salafi Islam and Marxist-Leninism) generated a political impulse to radically challenge the existing domestic and international orders. There is no bargaining position short of total victory or total defeat. The cause of the violence, in other words, is not ideology per se, but instead a political agenda of changing institutions along lines that those with an interest in the status quo are bound to resist. No compromise or agreement, as in balance-of-power systems, is possible, because merely trading a bit of land, or imposing an indemnity of some amount, cannot constitute a basis for peace. Indeed, it is not possible to conceive of a peace agreement of any kind with ISIS, short of its voluntary disappearance.

In this sense, whether or not the Koran (or any other religious text) sanctions violence is irrelevant, as are the specific motivations of those within the movement. What is consequential is that a political impulse to change institutions is generating conflict, and not whether there is a theological basis for the means selected to bring about that change, such as terrorism, conventional warfare, or some other form of irregular warfare.

RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE can exist devoid of conflict—take animal sacrifice. And conflict within a religious community, about who will be abbot, pope or so on, entails rank and status, and is indistinguishable from any other kind of group’s social dynamics. What this discussion is concerned with is religion in the sense of rules governing social behavior. Doctrine itself cannot lead to political or religious conflict. Doctrine can lead to religious or political conflict if and only if a group seeks to reorder authority and power in ways consistent with a particular doctrine. By this definition, heresy is a form of religious conflict, because it is about social order and not simply about doctrine.

While it is possible to identify cases of religious conflict in which explicitly religious motivations are at the forefront (and where religious “difference” is a cause of conflict in its own right), in general this is rare. More common are conflicts involving different religious communities, in which religious authority is one of the nodal points of authority that is being contested, but in which identifying and isolating specifically religious motivation is much harder. Perhaps the most obvious example of the former type is the Crusades of the medieval period, in which grasping the religious dimension is essential to understand the whole. A more typical “religious conflict” is the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, which entailed disparate social groups responding to threats to their “way of life,” which fundamentally involved religion (or at least issues connected to religion, like property and kinship). This latter understanding of what constitutes a religious conflict holds for a wide range of cases, including the French Wars of Religion, the medieval expansion of Latin Christendom into neighboring communities that were organized along various lines and the early Islamic conquests of the Near East, to name a few. The point is that the addition of religious motivation to a theoretical framework on religious conflict actually adds very little in the way explanatory power. Even in the case of the Crusades, motivation explains the target selection (Jerusalem), but not what the Crusaders actually did when they established conquest states in the eastern Mediterranean. These political entities were actually quite similar to the conquest states established by Latin Christians in Wales, Ireland, the Baltic and so on—all of which can also be understood in religious terms, even though the motivations for their establishment were much more complex than in the Levant.

Can these conflicts be usefully thought of as “religious” at all? Indeed, in most of the cases mentioned above (the Indian Rebellion, the European Wars of Religion and so on) there is a long tradition of denying conflicts’ religious elements and focusing instead on socioeconomic factors. It may therefore be useful to use the example of the Indian Rebellion to illustrate just in what sense these conflicts can be understood as religious.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857–58 was the largest anticolonial revolt in history, and as such forms a watershed moment in the development of colonial empires. It is also a particularly good example of just how complicated “religious” conflicts can become when viewed through the prism of religious motivation.

A major shift in the nature of colonial rule in India occurred as the British defeated the other contenders for power in post-Mughal India. This shift is most pronounced in the period coinciding with the defeat of Maratha power during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and intensified in the 1830s and 1840s. Colonial rule went from respecting established power structures to assaulting them outright. From the British colonists’ perspective, they were simply rationalizing their rule by creating British-Indian law and regulating social relationships, as necessitated by their need to dispense justice and establish their authority.

However, in doing so the British alienated and challenged groups that ranged from princely houses upset about the introduction of primogeniture, to Hindus unhappy with the abolition of sati (widow burning), to Muslims who resented the inroads made by Christian missionaries. Different groups, then, reacted to different British challenges to established patterns of power and authority, which ultimately led to what William Dalrymple calls “a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance, whose form and fate were determined by local and regional situations, passions and grievances.” What gave the mutiny coherence was the participants’ general sense that the British were engaged in a systematic attempt to destroy India’s religions, in the sense of particular ways of life. While many Britons in the colonial administration truly did view Hinduism and Islam with contempt, and sought the conversion of the people of India, the principal concerns of the colonial administration lay with the establishment of firm and uncontested domination in South Asia, at minimal costs to themselves. Their policies, however, had the cumulative effect of triggering a religious war—indeed, a very strange one that united a coalition of groups that included jihadis, sadhus (Hindu mendicants), princely lineages and members of the British sepoy army. This was not a conflict that was triggered by the fact of British/Christian rule in India; it was a conflict triggered by British policies that threatened a range of social groups, who responded by taking up arms. That the British understood the religious dimensions of the conflict is best illustrated by how they came to handle the issue of religion: after 1858, it became official British policy to defend orthodoxy, prevent missionizing activity and portray themselves as neutral arbiters in the sectarian relations of their Indian subjects.

COMMUNAL PLURALISM, whether defined in ethnic, religious or linguistic terms, is historically very normal—as it is, indeed, in our own era. Under normal circumstances, as liberal scholars have consistently held, intercommunal relations are nonviolent and individual-level interactions follow the range of human possibilities across communal boundaries (love, hate, friendship and the like). This norm of intercommunal peace has led scholars to a further conclusion: that because under normal circumstances intercommunal relations tend to be peaceful, when that peace breaks down it is because of the agency of political actors who have something to gain personally from the violence. This implication, drawn from the norm of intercommunal peace and the observed mechanisms of its breakdown, is insufficient.

It is critical to note that while pluralism is normal in human societies across time and space, communal equality is most certainly not. Indeed, both historically and today it is difficult to identify a pluralistic society that also practices communal equality. This means that while communal coexistence is normal, so is the reality that this coexistence, almost without exception, has also been structured hierarchically, with a dominant group establishing the framework within which other groups “coexist” within a pluralistic society. This pluralism-cum-hierarchy has been practiced par excellence by Islamic states, above all the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. In both of these cases, as in all other historical empires, coexistence between the dominant (Sunni Islamic) group and the multitude of minority religions was, on the whole, peaceful. This peace was based, as the discussion above notes, on a shared acceptance of certain institutional arrangements that formalized the dominance of Sunni Islam while providing other religious groups with a legitimate, if necessarily secondary, place within the political order.

As long as all accepted this arrangement, peace and perhaps even intercommunal harmony prevailed. Conflict, in these cases “religious” conflict, occurred when one or more groups sought to change the institutional arrangements (and by definition the power relations) between the communities. The later histories of both empires mentioned above—the Ottoman and Mughal—were shot through with religious conflicts and violence, as different religious communities sought to establish new patterns of intercommunal power relations. The key issue is that the cause of these efforts to reconfigure power relations between religious communities was inherently political, because the institutions that managed communal relations were by definition political. It is here that we find the intersection of religion, conflict and political violence.

In the contemporary world, religion is a driving force behind political conflict in the sense that religious communities are making formal and informal efforts to change political institutions to their liking. In religiously pluralistic states—including Syria, but also Pakistan, Nigeria, India and many, many others—these changes come at the expense of other religious communities and, in some cases, as a direct challenge to secular institutional configurations (as in Egypt). In all these cases, the important question from a public-policy standpoint is not why individuals are drawn to religious politics, but how religious communities express their communalism politically. When framed in this way, the central focus of liberal scholarship on political agency recedes. Instead, we are confronted with the reality that there is nothing abnormal about religious communities engaging in political collective action to rearrange institutions to their liking, and that these efforts cause conflict with other religious (and irreligious) groups with a stake in the preservation of the existing order.

In this sense, religious conflicts have a great deal in common with the “ideological” conflicts of the recent past (the French and Russian Revolutions being exhibits A and B). In both of these processes, it was not the existence of liberals or Marxists per se that generated the terrible violence resulting from their attempts at changing the existing social order. Instead, it was the logic of having to overcome the tremendous resistance of those with a stake in the status quo that led to violence. Religion, while differing from liberalism and Marxism in its fundamental principles, shares with these movements the fact of being a system of basic principles meant, by definition, to guide the construction of social and political institutions. Stated thusly, the political nature of religion becomes self-evident, but also less alien and surprising. Neither should the violence that it has the potential to generate.

ALL OF which brings us back to the puzzle offered at the beginning of this essay: namely, organized and routine violence in the name of cow protection in a country that is one of the largest exporters of beef. What are we to make of this seeming paradox? As I have argued previously in these pages (“The Myth of a Liberal India,” November/December 2015), neither the Indian state nor its society is liberal, in the sense of comprising individuals equal before the eyes of the law. Instead, it comprises different corporate groups in competition, much of it violent, over the basic institutional framework of the state and the society. These are not groups that are content to accept the basic equality (however defined) of others. The violence over cow protection targets two groups: Muslims and Dalits (the low-caste members of society formerly called untouchables). In other words, these are vigilantes of high-caste Hindus, whose explicit agenda is to reduce every other group (both in caste and religion) to mere appendages of a social order in which all of the benefits flow upward.

These cleavages are not “invented” identities—or at least, no less real than any other social identity. Violence in India over cow protection goes back centuries. There is nothing new about this. Indeed, one of the worst incidents of violence in British India between the Great Mutiny of 1857 and independence in 1947 occurred in 1893, in which countless people lost their lives in cow-protection riots in Bombay alone. The violence was a language with which to speak to the British colonial government about communal hierarchy, because the British colonial government had to listen to widespread communal violence. This was violence as a form of negotiation among four parties: the British, the Congress Party nationalist movement, Muslims and upper-caste (communal) Hindus. It occurred at a time when the British began to make substantive concessions to some degree of self-government. It really was religious violence—in the sense that religious communities were making claims to power and authority at the expense of other groups.

The basic political-cum-religious problem at stake in cow-protection vigilantism was succinctly put by the most important Muslim thinker in late-nineteenth-century British India, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (the founder of Aligarh Muslim University), in a famous speech delivered in 1888:

“Now, suppose that the English community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations—the Mohammedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable. But until one nation has conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land.”

It is worth emphasizing that Mahatma Gandhi fully concurred with Sir Syed that religion cannot be divorced from politics. In 1915, he would declare in a speech to students in Madras that “politics cannot be divorced from religion.” Indeed, Gandhi had this to say about cow protection in 1920: “Cow protection is the outward form of Hinduism. I refuse to call anyone a Hindu if he is not willing to lay down his life in this cause. It is dearer to me than my very life.” Throughout his life in Indian politics, Gandhi consistently and persistently upheld the legitimacy of the principle that cow protection was a fundamental religious obligation of Hindus, and he urged Muslims to refrain from killing cows voluntarily.

Gandhi and Khan might as well as have added the obvious in their speeches: that in India, religion is not about individual faith but about communal identity. There is no operative liberal individualistic definition of religion in India. Beef eating, therefore, has been a communal demarcation between groups in India for centuries. It was also, among other demarcations, a boundary marker between Christians and Hindus. But Hindus cow-protection vigilantes have only engaged in organized violence against Muslims and Dalits. This is not surprising. Christians are not, as a group, contenders for power in India. Dalits and Muslims are.

Hindu vigilantes are using violence over particular issues (cow protection in this instance) as a language of negotiation with the Indian state about how communal power relations are to be structured. These vigilantes have also used other issues to engage in violence against Muslims—most nefariously the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, in which not only the mosque itself was demolished by hand, but it triggered a wave of rioting throughout northern India in which several thousand people were killed. Here is an answer to how one of the world’s biggest exporters of beef can also have an organized movement of vigilantes engaged in violence over the slaughter of cattle: it is about communal hierarchy. But—and this is key—the theological underpinnings of this are entirely irrelevant.

Liberalism is grounded in a rejection of communalism and hierarchy, in favor of individualism and equality. But this ideological slant is rapidly becoming a luxury that the West can no longer indulge in. Eliminating religion as a political cleavage in Europe took two hundred years of terrible conflict and violence, and resulted in religiously homogenous societies across much of Europe. The reemergence of religious communalism in western Europe has come as a deep and disconcerting shock to societies long used to thinking of themselves as “postreligious.” If we like religious pluralism, then we will also have to get used to the idea of communal hierarchies.

The principal public-policy challenge of our time is devising responses to the assertion of communal rights (and power) in pluralistic societies that manage the inevitable conflict that pluralism, religious included, necessarily generates—without insisting that the liberal framing of the problem (individualism) be imposed on societies long organized along communal lines. But that is a subject for another day.

Vivek S. Sharma has taught politics at Yale, EHESS (Paris), the University of Copenhagen and the Claremont Colleges.

Image: Reuters