(iPoster) How Political Violence Disrupts Religious Institutions

• In Event: Poster Session: Immigration Politics in a Changing World & Middle East Section
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Middle East Section

Abstract

Religious leaders and the institutions they operate within have an integral role in shaping the views, identities, and values of their adherents (Hoffman 2020, Hurd 2015, Taliep et al. 2016, Edwards and Oyakawa 2022, Freedman 2020). Of course, this ordinarily involves the shaping of religious views, identities, and values. However, they are also critical to their communities’ social, economic, and political views. And where existing political science research focuses extensively on the mobilizing effect of religious leaders towards electoral goals, social values, and economic preferences, much less has worked on attitudes towards violence (Cao 2018, Blair et al. 2021). In this project, I focus on political violence and its manifestations across several countries in the Middle East and North Africa and ask, why do religious institutions sometimes react to or speak on political violence and other times not? I investigate the conditions that lead to engaging with discussions about political violence and, in subsequent projects, what information, if at all, is being transmitted to the religious institution’s adherent community. I answer this question using new data from the social media accounts of local religious leaders and institutions which I link to event-level data on religiously-motivated violence in Kuwait and Lebanon.

Author

• Mostafa El Sharkawy, University of Michigan