Sanctions against Russia: Why and how they work, or should work

Article by Vladimir Dubrovskiy and Krassen Stanchev

August 10, 2022

Sanctions against Russia: Why and how they work, or should work

“What’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history. Humanity’s greatest political achievement has been the decline of war. That is now in jeopardy”.

Yuval Noah Harari[1]

After the horror and shock at Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, and atrocities committed against civilians, the tide seemed to turn with several loud voices arguing that the West should allow Putin to save face, that Ukraine could not win, and that the nuclear and other military threats are likely to materialise. It is no surprise that leftist politicians, some postmodern thinkers and isolationists express such views. But, regretfully, they are appearing in the mainstream thinking as well.

Blame has been placed on politicians for ignoring academic literature and calculations on economic sanctions, specifically with reference to punitive sanctions imposed on Russia since March this year. However, the genuine scientific approach distinguishes itself primarily not by its respect for the literature, but by the reliance on facts and logic as opposed to wishful thinking, opinions, and assumptions. From this perspective arguments by proponents of an immediate compromise on Putin’s conditions that would allow for the lifting of the sanctions are deadly flawed.

At the heart of the argument are short-term economic calculations of the pain inflicted by sanctions to Russia and the rest of the World. It is put forward that the goal of the sanctions, whatever it is, is not worth the price paid by the countries imposing them – because they will suffer more in terms of welfare loss than Russia does. This may be so in absolute terms. However, regardless of the real magnitude of such a ratio of the losses, this argument hardly makes any economic sense and should be regarded rather as a manipulation of the truth or distortion of reality.

Wars are destructive to both conquered people and territories and conquerors. Sanctions against Russia are far from exhausting the impact of war on the economies and people of the countries involved. Recent assessments of the war’s global impacts predict higher commodity prices, additional long-lasting high inflation and increased risks of stagflation, recession, and social unrest.[2] Inflation in the EU has been triggered by government spending, debts and follow-up monetary expansion, incapacity to enforce monetary constraints, including the so called ‘quantitative easing’. However, the war, sanctions and counter-sanctions are likely to result in additional, not yet statistically detected, inflation. It comes from expectations about the future and hedging against perceived upcoming risks – all aggravated by the war. For them one should hold accountable the aggressor and what matters is the general principle: war expense results in higher inflation.

Still, as long as international trade benefits all involved parties, the restrictions put on it incur losses on all parties.

In economics all macro reasoning is based, or should be based, on practical experiences. With embargoes and sanctions one such experience is that they punish everyone but not necessarily (and in the first place) those responsible. This is indeed the story of similar sanctions imposed on regimes similar to Putin’s in ex-Yugoslavia, Iraq and Iran. And this is a legitimate point in all criticisms of sanctions, irrespective of the world view, political, geopolitical or methodological background the critique is built on.

However, at least in two of these cases they had political effect: contributed to the regime change in former Yugoslavia, and forced Iran to the compromise on its nuclear program.

Economics is about rational choices made by economic agents comparing the graduations of cost and benefit of different options from which to choose from. Therefore, a comparison of losses incurred by unrelated agents is pointless because it cannot be used for making a choice by either of them.

Instead, the West as a rational player should compare the losses from sanctions to the opportunity costs, i.e. the costs of not imposing sanctions. More precisely, the total cost of helping Ukraine in defeating Russia, that along with sanctions includes also direct expenses on military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, should be compared to the cost of doing nothing. The latter costs may seem to be zero, but this is wrong.

Let us even put aside the moral component, including not only the West’s humiliation, but, most of all, terrifying atrocities to which the Ukrainians remaining under the Russian occupation are being exposed, exemplified by Bucha. If we remain within the realms of economic logic, a correct calculus should compare the imagined states of the world in two cases: with and without sanctions and help.

In the first case there is a good chance of getting rid of the current Kremlin regime; in the second case this regime has a good chance to strengthen itself by defeating Ukraine and humiliating the West. This second case will be strikingly different from the one before 24^th February because the situation has changed irreversibly; this is a fact many people in the world fail to recognise.

In order to understand the difference a shift from pure economics to political economy and even more ‘soft’ social sciences, such as history and political science is necessary. The logic and historical arguments below are developing the suggestion made by Yuval Noah Harari in his pre-war article, where he argues that “what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history”.[3]

What is at stake?

Contrary to the unscrupulous statements, the Kremlin aggression is not about Ukraine’s possible NATO membership. Putin in his speech on 21^st February has explicitly stated that he considers the existence of independent Ukraine a historical misunderstanding that he will correct by cancelling its statehood. His troops’ actions have since then made it very clear that Russia is committed to annihilating Ukraine as an independent state. The Kremlin sees an all-out military aggression as a “legitimate” way to achieve this goal, as well as simply expanding the Russia’s territory.

These are essentially fascist ideas, as Timothy Snider has recently explained.[4] Russia is ruled by a fascist regime endowed with nuclear weapons. Moreover, the main subject of its aggression is not the Ukrainian nation, but the liberal Western values it embraces, or, more broadly, the West and its values in general – Putin and his cronies are absolutely explicit in this.[5]

Many left-wing politicians, friends of the Kremlin in Europe, right-wing political scientists and sensible economists do not acknowledge that today’s Russia meets almost all the criteria for a fascist state: a cult of the past; an often illusory grandeur and a cult of the dead; sadness at the loss of imperial greatness; resentment at the ‘injustice’ of history; a view that the outside world is hostile; a cult of a single leader; and a belief that ‘justice’ should be restored through war and the conquest of new territories.

The very existence of such a regime poses a concrete threat to the rest of the world because the essence of fascism is aggression augmented with denial of the basic principles of rule of law, international order, human rights, etc.; they are being replaced with the use of force. There are only two ways of dealing with such aggressive and dangerous regimes: either imposing an iron cage on them, or neutralising them. An iron cage here means the need for high military expenditures not only for the fascist country itself but for all potential subjects of its aggression. When such a country possesses nuclear missiles, everybody on Earth is in danger and pays the price. This is simply ignored by short-sighted economic calculations. This price is really enormous, many times above the one of the sanctions, weapons supplied to Ukraine, and all the damages the war brings taken together.

Prof. Harari argues that military expenses as a share of total government spending declined dramatically in the post-WWII world. He attributes this to exactly those revolutionary changes in human culture that fascism challenges. Economists would question if this reduction cannot be confused by the dramatic increase of government spending as a share of GDP that took place simultaneously. Still, this conclusion holds even if we consider only the share of military spending in the GDP, the progress in the last 60 years is remarkable.[6]

Note that, contrary to the widespread misconception, WWII did not put an end to fascism in Snider’s meaning. The losers were indeed de-Nazified and demilitarised so that almost no trace of fascism can be observed in their contemporary societies or government politics. But the USSR continued preparing for a new World War, with a belligerent rhetoric, and huge investments in armaments. This was mirrored by large military spending of the potential victims of aggression.

The situation changed after the Cuba missile crisis. The Soviet Union failed to enforce its threats (in spite of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact and then of Afghanistan) and had to admit that war could not be an option – thereby abandoning its principal fascist policy component. Instead, it focused on an economic race with the West that it lost miserably. The arms race continued, however, and the USSR lost it too. When the USSR disintegrated, this allowed the rest of the world to further reallocate resources to enhance welfare spending so that according to the World Bank’s data, from 1960 to the end of the Cold War in 1985 the world’s military spending as share of GDP declined from 6.3% to 4.2%, and then further to 2.4% by 2020.

This happened because for the first time in history the world order became based on the primacy of the respect for the international rules, including internationally recognised borders, universal human rights, and non-intervention in domestic affairs. It was, of course, not completely without wars and deficiencies. But most of the world’s rule breakers, such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden, were acknowledged as “villains” and were eliminated, politically, by means of war and/or in the face of an international tribunal.

In a general sense it was a ‘unipolar world’ with the US acting as a global ‘sheriff’. Such a sheriff may not always be wise and fair, but as long as they remain sane due to real democratic control, such a law and order regime is still a far better option than the rule of force.

There was, however, a notable exemption to the rule. Since 1992, the military spending as a share of GDP for the Russian Federation is twice as high as the world average, and three or more times higher than in neighboring countries, including Georgia until 2004 and Ukraine until 2014. From the post-Communist countries (if not in the Northern Hemisphere), Russian is the only state, which in the last 30 years annexed a territory from a neighboring country (Crimea) and occupied and then recognised the ‘statehood’ of five other territories, one in Moldova, two in Georgia and Ukraine. Like in older Soviet precedents of Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, the Kremlin did not like the political developments in those countries. As laid out, Putin-led Russia has built a fascist regime on militaristic and imperial sentiments, deliberately provoked by the Kremlin. As a result, every time Putin needs a boost to his public support, he starts a war, with no serious punishment so far. The calculations he has made up to now were politically rational, not economically.

It was the Second Chechen War that brought him to power. Despite striking similarities with Kosovo, the Russian atrocities in Chechnya brought hardly any reaction out of the West. Then Putin explicitly expressed his intentions of toppling the world order, particularly by promising to weaponise oil and gas exports in Munich when in 2007 Russia enjoyed historically high prices on oil and gas markets. This “promise” was met with surprise, at best modest outrage, and sometimes even with understanding.

Putin drew the correct conclusions out of this reaction and when his popularity, which was gained on the back of the price boom, became endangered by the burst in 2008 he successfully upheld it by an outright aggressive war against Georgia. The reaction appeared to be more than modest again, with the infamous ‘reload’ following.

The next time he needed a boost to his popularity, then undermined by income stagnation, augmenting mass corruption and the stolen 2011 elections (see the chart by the Levada Centre data), he annexed Ukrainian Crimea in March 2014 and sent the mercenaries, often supported by regular troops, into Ukraine’s Donbas.[7] This time there was a reaction in the form of economic sanctions, accompanied with excluding Russia from the G8. However, unlike in similar cases of Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait, or Slobodan Milosevic supporting Serbian separatism in neighboring countries, none of Putin’s acquisitions were reversed and no effective sanctions imposed. Moreover, the West convinced Ukraine not to fight for Crimea. The Russian economy has since stagnated, at least partly due to the sanctions, but these were too weak to force it to change course.

This outrageous violation of international law (including the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine surrendered its – the third largest in the world – nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of its sovereignty from all other nuclear powers, including Russia, China and the US) effectively destroyed the world order and led to a return back to the pre-perestroika years, if not pre-Cuba era. This led Ukraine to sharp increases in the military spending.

At the time no one else was sober enough to face this sad truth and make the necessary hard choices. The West found excuses for its passivity. It did not start investing in defense and security (e.g. energy one), nor work to counteract the aggressor. Of course, no one could propose attacking a nuclear power with military force. Making it really pay financially for its nefarious actions and depriving it from the possibilities to modernise its weaponry would have been an option. Unfortunately, no state was ready to bear the related cost.

On the wake of the post COVID-19 recovery of 2021, the EU reinforced its 2018 central nudging plan of a ‘Green Deal’ by redesigned intervention via programs like the ‘Next Generation EU – COVID-19 recovery package’, or the ‘Just Transition Mechanism: making sure no one is left behind’ – the policy instrument that closes coal power plants to substitute the fuel with natural gas (as a transit energy resource). In reality the Green Deal and the enhanced EU addiction to energy supplies, were and to a large extend still are an effective subsidies to natural gas imports from Russia (at 45% import dependency).

The worth of EU’s goods’ imports from Russia grew from EUR 158.5 billion to 162.4 billion and were dominated by fuel and mining products (62% of the total). As to the world, on year on year basis the exports from Russia went up by 72%, to the post-Soviet countries – by almost 77%.[8]

The growth of Russia’s economy to the level of 2020 and especially the growth of oil export revenues in 2018 and 2021 (by about 41% and at the highest level since 2006) are the main source of financing the war with Ukraine. According to the World Bank data, in 2021 Russia’s GDP recuperated to USD 1.78, 11^th in the world of 196 countries. Relative to the EU, Russian economy was 1/10 of the Union’s GDP. But the West negligence of Kremlin’s disrespect of international law seem to be working well for Russia.

When the same regime saw its internal support begin to start erode again, it did what it has done before, albeit on a much larger scale – and the hard choice described above reappeared again, but with much more at stake.

What proponents of Russia fail to understand is that the situation for the West changed irreversibly on 24^th February, or, in fact, eight years before, when Russia annexed Crimea.

There cannot be a ‘business as usual’ approach with Russia any more. And if the Kremlin regime survives there is an increased risk the whole world order of the last few decades will crash. If the international agreements are as futile as they appear, the world will return to the rule of the strongest. Then, China can grab Taiwan, Serbia can go “de-nazifying” the neighboring post-Yugoslav countries, North Korea can blackmail with its nuclear missiles, and Russia can continue raising the stakes in its confrontation with the West.

Consider the possible scenarios while taking into account the peculiar Kremlin regime:

Ukraine wins, the West helps and sanctions defeat Russia, and it dismantles its current regime. The pre-war world order is back, and gets strengthened because this is a serious warning for possible future aggressors. There are some risks associated with the Kremlin’s decay, explained in another article, but they are not our subject here.[9] Before the regime falls, the rest of the world pays an uncertain indirect price due to the sanctions and costs of post-war reconstruction (financed hopefully by reparations that Russia will be forced to pay).
Russia defeats Ukraine, eliminates her statehood, wipes out her culture, and successfully expands its own empire. Although the West will never recognise this conquest (as it was the case with the Baltic countries during their occupation by the USSR), sanctions will nevertheless be lifted, because ‘they have no effect’ and ‘Russia should not feel humiliated’. As a result, Putin’s regime internally solidifies, just as it was after the Crimea annexation. It will allow Putin to successfully arrange the power transition in case of his death or serious illness. Russia will get a new momentum for militarisation and learn the lessons from its war against Ukraine: it can do whatever it wants as this is just a matter of being impudent and owning nuclear weapons. The West has to either surrender, which is politically unimaginable, or sharply increase its military spending to the pre-Cuba levels: it would mean an additional 4% of its GDP (USD 3.8 trillion) of unproductive expenditures that would also increase inflation.
A ‘Finnish compromise’ whereby Ukraine retains its sovereignty but loses some territories and has to agree on a neutral status with limitations in its military capacities. Note, however, that the Russian culture does not value compromise. This is one of its most important differences with the West. Russian and Soviet diplomats were taught that there cannot be a win-win solution because everything is a zero-sum game. Therefore, even if ‘nobody wins’ this would be perceived by Putin as a defeat, because he failed to reach his main goal that he publicly declared for this war: the elimination of Ukrainian statehood. At the same time, he will ‘save face’ by presenting Ukraine’s territorial and sovereignty concessions as a ‘victory’ for his people, thereby maintaining and enhancing his own popularity. This means that quite soon Russia will restore its military capacities, learn the lessons of its mistakes in the war, and next time increase the stakes further. In other words, just like in case of a Russian victory, we will be in the pre-Cuba world again.

The real choice the West, therefore, faces is between: 1) increasing the military spending at least 2.5 times, approximately for an additional 4% of GDP (Germany has already raised them by 100 billion euros); or 2) bearing the cost of getting rid of Russia’s fascist regime now, which is estimated by CEPR at 0.5% of GDP in the loss from sanctions and about the same amount in military aid.[10] This is altogether about four times less than in the ‘do nothing’ option. It is clear what the rational choice in this case must be. Note that eight years ago this price would have been about 50% lower. If decision-makers avoid this choice again, next time the price will be much higher again.

What about Russia?

So far we have focused on the West’s calculations. But what about the second actor – Russia? Cannot it be motivated to return to normal behaviour too, or is the regime’s destruction the only way? And, in any case, can the sanctions do the trick?

Unfortunately, there is no pure economic solution to this problem, because, as mentioned above, the very calculations that a fascist regime makes is not economic, but political. Of course, support for the regime depends on its economic performance and expectations of increased future wealth. Unlike democracies however, it is not a leading factor for ideologically indoctrinated people brainwashed by constant propaganda. Not to mention the repressive apparatus that allows for ignoring the peoples’ interests to a large extent, if not completely. Otherwise such a regime could not wage a war that is always economically disastrous, apart from the death toll.

The imperial instinct that Putin exploits is based on presupposition rooted in the Agrarian Age when grabbing of territories increased the metropolis’ wellbeing. In fact, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was at least followed by major economic downturn and a ruble devaluation. They were mainly caused by oil price fall but the modest sanctions of those times also could have certain effect.

In 1992, the GDP of the Russian Federation was USD 359.5 billion US dollars, and in 2013 – almost USD 2.3 trillion. That is, in 2013 the economy of the Russian Federation was about 1/5 of the economy of the EU then. In 2014, however, Russia’s GDP ‘shrunk’ to about two trillion dollars. In 2015, as a result of the international situation, the annexation of Crimea and the orientation to dominate the former USSR through the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Russia’s GDP was already USD 1.36 trillion, and in 2016 – 1.27 trillion US dollars. As noted above, size-wise in 2021, the economy of Russia was already 10% of the EU. Nevertheless, the public approval rates of Russian authorities remained at their historical high and only started to deteriorate in 2018.

Therefore, economic incentives seem futile in preventing or halting wars like the present one, as are expectations that Russia can return to civilised behaviour under its present political regime.

Moreover, if the regime had been at least politically rational, it would never have started the war. For this reason most rational experts, including the authors, failed to predict Kremlin’s horrendous aggression. Russia’s behaviour lacks any rationality, which is either due to Putin’s illness, his admiration for cults, or misinformation. Therefore, ensuring removal of the Kremlin regime is the only way of returning to the ‘business as usual’ of the last 30 years.

How can this be accomplished? The rest of the world has only two tools: 1) a defeat on the battlefield by the Ukrainian military, if sufficiently equipped; and 2) sanctions. None of these can be sufficient in itself, but put together they have a good chance to break the regime’s backbone.[11]

The orders within the regime’s hierarchy are being fulfilled only as long as the members perceive its time horizon as infinite. Opponents to sanctions have a point that maintaining modest pains result in ‘rallying around the flag’ rather than any pressure in the desired direction. But should the members of formal and, more importantly, informal verticals of power realise that the hierarchy’s days are numbered, they could start behaving more opportunistically. All of them currently would still like to continue serving, and all are fearing the breakup, but with a finite time horizon they would get engaged in the collective one-shot prisoners’ dilemma game.

This is exactly how the academic literature describes the premature meltdown of the USSR, which caused, among other things, the deliberate policies of the Reagan administration.[12] Remember that Reagan came to power, partly, on the backdrop of his predecessor’s weak reaction to the USSR’s invasion. In-line with the above described logic, if starving out the economy becomes a reality and if the Russian army is defeated, the outcome will likely be a destruction of the Kremlin’s vertical of power. Not of the international economy and rule of law. Coming back to the above discussed scenarios, less economically destructive is the one that promises a restoration of the international order.

The arms race, started by Reagan, appeared unbearable for the USSR, already suffering from the COCOM embargo. At the same time, it lost the war in Afghanistan. On top of this, low energy prices toppled the USSR’s budget. The nomenklatura reacted with an avalanche-like destruction of the vertical of power. As a result, the world lived for 30 years without fear of nuclear war, in remarkable peace and stability.

Those times worrying about nuclear weapons ending up in the hands of irresponsible politicians or even terrorists were as strong as now, but in the end only Russia retained its arsenal. Ironically, now it is in the hands of exactly this kind of politician obsessed with anti-Western resentment.

The parallels with the present moment are striking, the main difference being Russia’s much broader exposure to international trade than the USSR’s, and, therefore, much higher vulnerability to sanctions. But can those be effective?

This depends on their real purpose. Of course, no sanctions can stop a fascist regime from waging war. Russia is paying a high toll in human lives, which is much more important than welfare, but nevertheless it continues the war. At the same time, it is hard to completely bleed its economy so as to minimise its means to wage war. Sanctions can prevent Russia from producing modern weapons, but it can still operate with old ones.

Despite widespread disappointment with the sanctions’ effect, it is already being felt by the Russian economy, population and the elites. Apart from personal sanctions, visa and air travel restrictions, and self-sanctions such as banning the Facebook and Instagram social networks, real disposable household incomes already started to fall after some post-COVID recovery in 2021, and so do the budget revenues – and this is on the backdrop of still raising oil prices and only modest sanctions that have taken force so far. Rephrasing Putin “we have even not started” with the major cuts of the Russian oil imports that are to be implemented during the second half of 2022 and 2023 years.

So far a reputation effect has a stronger impact on Russia than the politically imposed sanctions. After the first wave of sanctions was announced, the country had become a reputational cost for about 1,000 companies. They left Russia not because of losing sales in its vast market but because of the high opportunity costs of staying at the expense of dwindling shares on the global markets. For the global consumers any business in Russia has become a stain of irresponsibility and anti-humanism. Russian legislators had set the legal framework for nationalisation abandoned assets and asked the central bank to acquire the banks that left the country. Forgone opportunities and the sunk costs from leaving Russia, obviously, seem less important than potential reputation losses.[13]

In 2021, Russia’s military budget reached USD 61.7 billion, the US’ military spending was USD 778.2 billion, that of NATO members – more that USD 1.1 trillion (before Sweden and Finland entry in the organisation), and China – USD 252 billion. In international comparison, the military spending of the Russian Federation before the invasion of Ukraine was respectively 12, 18 and four times less significant in absolute terms. From the standpoint of a possible future standoff with an arms race the Kremlin’s options are rather limited.

We are not talking about the difference in quality and technology here. Economically backward Russia is also backward in military terms, the rest is nothing more than propaganda for those who criticise sanctions triggered by the war on Ukraine.

All in all: the economic strength of the EU and the West in general will almost certainly weaken Russia economically; militarily her options are also limited. The hardships ahead for the economy and the people of Russia, evolving now gradually, will remain for a long term. Staying firm on sanctions is easier, defends the rule of international law and is a more prosperous course of policy action (for Russia as well, eventually) than what critics of sanctions expect.

However, firm resolve here is essential. If western politicians act cautiously, and keep thinking that they better not irritate Putin too much because they will have to deal with him in the future, then, of course, their indecisiveness will translate into actions that make the Kremlin confident. On the other hand, if the world community acts decisively to neutralise the lawbreaker then there is a good chance of returning to the acceptable previous times.

When a karate champion breaks a brick with his bare hand, he should be absolutely confident and resolute, otherwise his strike will not get through. If he does, the brick gets destroyed, and a man feels only minor, if any, pain. However, if his strike is indecisive, the force he applies cannot break a brick, and he risks a serious trauma. The same here. Putin’s last hope is indecisiveness of those he considers as his enemies. The world’s last hope is their braveness and resolve, which they can learn from Ukraine – and (indeed) from Ronald Reagan.

Vladimir Dubrovskiy is a political economist based in Kyiv (Senior Economist at CASE Ukraine).

Krassen Stanchev teaches Macroeconomic Analysis and Public Choice at Sofia University, chairs the board of the Institute for Market Economics and is an ex-MP of the Constitutional Assembly of Bulgaria (1990-1991).

[1] Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history, The Economist, February 2022, https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/02/09/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-whats-at-stake-in-ukraine-is-the-direction-of-human-history

[2] Coface, Country & Sector Risk Barometer – Q2 2022, June 2022, https://www.coface.com/News-Publications/Publications/Country-Sector-Risk-Barometer-Q2-2022; Gabriel Di Bella et al., Natural Gas in Europe: The Potential Impact of Disruptions to Supply, July 2022, IMF Working Papers, IMF, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2022/07/18/Natural-Gas-in-Europe-The-Potential-Impact-of-Disruptions-to-Supply-520934

[3] Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history, The Economist, February 2022, https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/02/09/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-whats-at-stake-in-ukraine-is-the-direction-of-human-history

[4] Timothy Snyder, We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist, The New York Times, May 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist

[5] Vladimir Dubrovskiy, How to stop Putin’s war against Ukraine, The Foreign Policy Centre, April 2020, https://fpc.org.uk/how-to-stop-putins-war-against-ukraine/

[6] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Yearbook: Armanents, Disarmament and International Security, Military expenditure (% of GDP), The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

[7] Chart by Levada Center: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TX21bn3493XohxnFISuz8IwFwy-Ls-j-t47V_Wq9bm0/edit?usp=sharing; Levada Center, see website: https://www.levada.ru/en/

[8] Trading Economics, Russia Exports, https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/exports

[9] Vladimir Dubrovskiy, How to stop Putin’s war against Ukraine, The Foreign Policy Centre, April 2022, https://fpc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Commentary-How-to-stop-Putins-war-against-Ukraine.pdf

[10] Kornel Mahistein, Christine McDaniel, Simon Schropp and Marinos Tsigas, Potential economic effects of sanctions on Russia: An Allied trade embargo, Vox, May 2022, https://voxeu.org/article/potential-economic-effects-allied-trade-embargo-russia?fbclid=IwAR2Yr6nkDMaMMs8SiIrKVK5oAiFPflSZkggXz7H9kCA1TwDCeufgm72aRE0

[11] Vladimir Dubrovskiy, How to stop Putin’s war against Ukraine, The Foreign Policy Centre, April 2022, https://fpc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Commentary-How-to-stop-Putins-war-against-Ukraine.pdf

[12] Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge University Press, November 2014, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/patronal-politics/4C1B4D49A7F17739E75A5AB7B66E2115; Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions, Harvard University Press, July 1998, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674836808

[13] Owen Matthews, Sanctions are working – whatever Putin says, The Spectator, August 2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sanctions-are-working–whatever-putin-says?fbclid=IwAR2B722Kymg4cn6ozbaZe6xYPGNoTs_MkbLpVnWKQ_yMFBwgl_HKFNJkKMM

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the individual authors and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre.

Topics

Conflict Resolution and Security

Energy, Environment and Resources

International Relations and Geopolitics

Ukraine Conflict

Regions

Former Soviet Union

Russia

War as a sign of weakness: Failure of reforms and of reframing the Russian nation

Article by Dr Leila Alieva

July 27, 2022

War as a sign of weakness: Failure of reforms and of reframing the Russian nation

Putin’s war so far has achieved all the opposite to the declared goals – NATO came even closer to its borders; Ukraine became more militarised; the most loyal to neutrality, Sweden and Finland, applied for NATO membership; and the usually disunited West showed unprecedented unity in application of sanctions. With the continuation of the war debate moves to the issue of whether Putin should be defeated and tried, or should he be brought to the negotiations table with the Ukrainian President, after a rather shocking statement by the French President, Macron, calling “not to humiliate Russia” in Strasbourg. The unprecedented violence, destruction and war on extermination developing in Ukraine hints to a rather personal nature of the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

The increasingly personalistic regime of Putin – which emerged from the failure of reforms, weak civil society, and institutional legacies of the totalitarian and Soviet regime – led to the domination of his psychological factors in Russia’s foreign policy. It can be reduced to a power contest between Putin and the US, (or Biden), where Ukraine is rather a tool and a legitimate and vulnerable target. He perceived it as a legitimate target due to his understanding of the nature of international relations as pure realpolitik and division in the spheres of influence by the great powers. He viewed it as a vulnerable one due to the anticipation of disunity in the West and its pragmatic rather than normative policies, as well as weak capacity and readiness of Ukrainians to resist. On all accounts he faced miscalculations. Yet, the war showed that at least two important actors were not taken seriously enough by the West – the Russian society and the newly independent states.

Reframing approaches

Macron was quite late with his appeal not to humiliate Russia. In fact, this is the right time to humiliate, and moreover to defeat it. There is no justification of the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and atrocities against civilians in this war, and Russia’s current behaviour is a direct consequence of the impunity, mixed messages, appeasement and unlimited pragmatic cooperation. The motivation of Putin was to prove that he is also entitled to invade and control other states, as is his perception of what the West does, with the US first of all. The ‘spoilers’’ role is not to resolve, but to violate, and thus raise the status and attention of oneself. However, what was left beyond the centre of attention most of the years of transition, is that there is not only a need of the people to be perceived equal to the others, but also to have a distinct – and dignified – positive identity, which makes them what they are with their culture and history. The domestic debates on identity took place early in Russian society, but often they were reduced to the historical ones and due to the weakness of society, and against the background of failing reform process, it allowed Putin to hijack the debate and fill an identity with the content of his power projection. Yet, there was something the West could have done. Instead of increasingly being concerned with supporting Russia’s regime status and not to “humiliate” it, they could have more openly recognised a positive potential of the people, or society to reform, even with the reference to history and/or culture. The distinct identity, or at the state level – identity – is taking place in interaction with the other states, who send the messages of the normative framework of the status and reputation. Making Russia not great but attractive – is the goal. Putin’s attempts to sketch such an ‘identity’ was about control and power, rather than added value to international relations – recall his interpretation of “dukhovnost” or other similar concepts. It was reinforced by the fact that the latter was understood by the West as purely technocratic exercise – cooperation in peacekeeping and security – or pragmatic economic cooperation. Mixed messages from the outside – speeches about human rights, but impunity in violations, such as those in Chechnya, or participation in the oil and gas deals by former and still influential politicians, the rewards of a ‘co-chairman seat’, or peacekeeping forces in spite of the rather destructive role in secessionist conflicts – allowed increasingly authoritarian Putin to utilise the West and its values as a threat domestically, while its institutions and representatives as enablers internationally. Thus, society was increasingly left behind in the equation of official relations. Society’s need in ideational factors, positive distinct identity, added value in the world affairs and culture were failed to be addressed domestically or were not recognised internationally. Hence the capacity of Putin to fill the void by ‘greatness’ which is measured by military victory and physical size of the country in a hijacked ‘identity’ process. He did not fully overlook the soft power issue in identity – in fact he stressed on a few occasions that Russia is now representing true European values, what he called “reasonable conservatism”. Although he refers to the prominent Russian philosophers’ tradition, it reflects the reality – failure of reforms and authoritarian rule – which makes Russia unattractive to the societies around Russia, as it indicates its incapacity to play a traditionally modernising and Europeanising role, at least for some regions of the Former Soviet Union and for some periods of history. If there was a positive influence in history, it was about such influence, as our survey just before the war in Ukraine discovered in perceptions in the South Caucasus.[1]

Putin’s perception of power and society’s stance on the war

Once the community cannot find its positive distinct identity it is easier for a leader to move to the role of ‘spoiler’, or status void of any normative content, and get support of the lost and disappointed society.

Moreover, power is understood in pre-modern/modern way, untouched by globalisation and technology, in terms of its physical size. Grabbing and collecting the lands as a way to make the country ‘great’ again is a convenient way for elites who failed or are resistant to make qualitative changes in the country. These debates have been taking place in Russia since early 1990s – whether Russia should focus on re-establishment of control over its former ‘periphery’ or on reforms and changes within the country’s borders. Our study on the experience of conflicts in the South Caucasus proved that post-Soviet autocrats are not interested in modernisation leading to the “opening of the post-Soviet minds”, as it will deprive them of a powerful tool of control and distraction from the domestic issues in substance.[2] The similar phenomenon is reflected in the “modernisation effect” typical of the rentier state (such as Russia) described by Michael Ross.[3] Military power has a dramatic quality and spectacular form needed for visualisation of the role of ‘victor’, which constitutes the core of the ‘greatness’ concept of officially narrated identity.

On the other hand, Putin and his proxies with old Soviet thinking are led by cynicism in perception of the nature of international relations as that of realpolitik, with the division of the world in the spheres of influence by the most powerful states. In his behaviour he is guided by the perceived “red lines” established by the foreign policies of the West, first of all by the US, justifying his invasion of Ukraine, which has even greater legitimacy in his eyes, as is in Russia’s “underbelly”, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan for the US.

It is often said nowadays that the West should have been taking Putin’s words and statements seriously, meaning his views on history of the Former Soviet Union states and Russia, signaling Russian imperial intentions and claims, which extended far beyond its current borders, most recently when he compared himself to Peter the Great. However, he also said several times about unique history and culture of Russia, and earlier in his time in office even about the importance of democracy as a way to realise this unique creative potential of Russians, otherwise predicting country’s stagnation.[4] Yet, whatever was a dynamic official rhetoric and way of thinking, the societal united alternative of the identity narrative did not ripe and hold. This is one of the factors explaining the population support of the war. Besides the unreliability of polling data in the politically restrictive conditions, the identification with the official narrative is an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance formed by need in positive identity – on the one hand, and – a negative information resulting from the actions by the state, which the citizen cling to – on the other, which happens in the absence of an alternative positive distinct identity.

Missed opportunities and the way forward

Similarly to the underestimation of society’s basic need for a distinct positive identity and the reduction of Russia’s foreign policy drivers to those of ruling elite’s ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘status’, another underestimation was related to the status of the Former Soviet Union states and their capacity to resist, form alliances, and the potential threat of unresolved conflicts, along with the dangers of appeasement of Russia’s leadership. But Ukraine’s resistance made the West take it more seriously.

Enthusiasm for “re-shaping Eurasia” by the bold policies of the South Caucasus leaders of the 1990s was replaced by the bitter awareness that the West will not counterbalance pressure from Russia –mainly coming through support for secessionist conflicts – in the 2000s. The GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova) – the only alliance formed not by the big powers, but from the states themselves – based on the common pro-Western orientation and common security concerns did not turn into a viable regional organisation, partly due to the fear of the West to upset and provoke Russia. The transformation of GUAM into an effective regional military-defense alliance before the countries and NATO became ready for their membership could make the resistance of the Ukrainian people to invasion much stronger and the war shorter. Having understood that they were left alone vis-à-vis Russia’s threat some states, such as Azerbaijan and most recently Georgia, turned to the balanced policies, with those who did not, like Ukraine, paying a high cost for not doing it.

Thus the Western reaction to the war in Ukraine disclosed both long term and short term challenges to its policies. The war, which is rather a deja vu moment in this part of the world after the dramatic experience of violence and wars in the 20^th century, demonstrated a failure of deterrence of the potentially dangerous leader in spite of all the signals coming from the smaller states since the end of the Cold War. It has also revealed the destructive power of the regime which fills the void of the failure of society to find its identity, reinforced by the underestimation of its role by the international community, and the sense of impunity and appeasement of the official policies. European Parliament appealed to the Russian society against the decades of identification of the country with the regime, which is as belated, as was Macron’s rather irrelevant appeal not to humiliate Russia. The latter would probably be more relevant to the society than to regime. Indeed, one of the ways to move forward is to credit people with the positive potential to reform, helping them to re-discover a civilised and distinct identity, based on humanism and universal values, rooted in their history and culture. The war in Ukraine is an expression of Russia’s weakness – its incapacity, based on identity, to form a unique contribution to world affairs, which would be attractive to other states and their societies first of all. One of the most powerful driving forces of South Caucasus states’ transformation was the memory (or distinct positive identity) of the pre-Soviet occupation, based on just two years of democratic experience of the modern nation state. Azerbaijan’s unique contribution to world affairs in the early 20^th century was building the first democratic republic in the Muslim East and being a source of liberal ideas far beyond its borders. This liberalising influence could be one of the ways to assert a distinct self instead of the imposition of control through either soft or hard power, as is done by Russia’s leader – who has found himself in deadlock of failed reforms, monopoly on power and national identity.

There is nothing unique in the search for national identity. The UK has been going through this process in the pre-Brexit period or in Germany with it serious re-consideration of the traditional Ostpolitik. However, in a decolonised country with non-democratic and weak state institutions the process might be painful and destructive.

While establishing identity at least two conditions are needed – freedoms and interaction with external actors for recognition. Currently the way out of this vicious circle for society is to gain confidence in having a potential positive distinct identity and added value. At this time, when the country is weak, this potential can always be found in one’s own history and culture to support costly moral choices made at a time of war. The participants of our survey stressed the possible role of modernisation, which Russia could have played, when conducting reforms, as in some periods of its history. The range of possible traits can vary from the cultural modernisation of the early 20^th century, progressive political reforms in the 19^th century (even if short term), scholarship and its influence on the world science, and the roots of freedoms, like in the Novgorod republic (although contested between the two nations). The latter indeed became a point of historical reference for the anti-war protesters in Russia since the end of February 2022, who chose the tricolor flag without red as a symbol of their movement. So even under the current oppressive conditions the society shows its attempts to change the nation and take back the hijacked control over identity formation from the autocrat.

Therefore, the objective of Russia finding its identity and place in the world is still ahead, and is a possibility as the societal protests show. However, it is a challenging task, as after the war in Ukraine is over it will have to go through real reforms, accompanied by transitional justice, holding criminals responsible, and atonement similar to that in the German state and society post-1940s.

[1] Leila Alieva and Bakhtiyar Aslanov, How autocracy impedes de-securitization, or why democracy matters: the case of Nagorno-Karabagh in the eyes of Azerbaijanis, Caucasus Survey 6, no. 3, (2018): 183-202, https://brill.com/view/journals/casu/6/3/casu.6.issue-3.xml

[2] Ibid.

[3] Michael L. Ross, Does Oil Hinder Democracy?, World Politics 53, no.3, (2001): 325-361, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236710633_Does_Oil_Hinder_Democracy

[4] Иван Шаблов, Putin said this during his conversation with the representatives of culture, in 2000 in exchange with a pop-singer Yurii Shevchuk, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/shablovioni/videos/3227457130599986

Topics

Civil Society

Conflict Resolution and Security

Democracy and Elections

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Human Rights

International Relations and Geopolitics

Regions

Former Soviet Union

Russia

Dividing Lines – Executive Summary

Article by Prof Simon Mabon

July 19, 2022

In the post 9/11 political landscape, politics is increasingly characterised by division. Whilst international politics has long been characterised by differences between states, shifts in global politics have contributed to the opening of fissures within states amidst the emergence of increasingly prominent identity markers in societies. In the Middle East, where deep societal divisions continue to resonate within and across state borders, the concept of sectarianism has become increasingly useful in understanding the nature of difference.

Although increasingly prominent, there is little consensus on how to define sectarianism, causing problems for scholars, practitioners and journalists. Despite this, there are strong reasons to use sectarianism as a means to analyse communal difference across different contexts. Indeed, the concept of sectarianism offers a strong analytical approach to understand the (re)construction, manipulation, or mobilisation of particular identity markers across time and place.

This report uses the concept of sectarianism to reflect on communal tensions across different contexts as a means of understanding the nature of division and the means through which divisions are mobilised. For those interested in understanding and addressing communal tensions and working towards a more just and equitable world, this report offers valuable insight into the workings of divided societies.

Key recommendations

Analytical:

To avoid viewing communal conflict as a product of immutable ‘ancient hatreds’;
To offer more nuanced analysis of communal difference beyond identity markers;
To contextualise identities within broader socio-economic moments;
To avoid essentialism in analysis of communal tensions; and
To acknowledge the importance of history, culture and religion in understanding difference but not to over stress it.

Policy Based:

To encourage a move to issue based politics;
To support civil society initiatives that operate across communal groups;
To support the emergence of issue based political parties;
To avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach to addressing communal violence; and
To support efforts to facilitate democracy and good governance.

Topics

Civil Society

Conflict Resolution and Security

Democracy and Elections

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Human Rights

International Relations and Geopolitics

Regions

Asia

East Asia

India

Indonesia

Japan

Malaysia

South Asia

Thailand

Europe

Northern Ireland

United Kingdom

Middle East and North Africa

Lebanon

United States and Canada

United States

Dividing Lines – Introduction: Sectarianism as a boundary making process

Article by Prof Simon Mabon

“There are few areas in the sociology of religion that are of greater inherent interest than that of sectarianism. In the study of religious sects, we come across a range of human passions and motivations hardly rivalled in any other sector of social life […]. On the modern scene we find the dynamics of sectarianism at work in places far removed from religion proper – in politics, arts literature, and even within the sacred precincts of science itself. It is not too much to say that in a deepening analysis of sectarianism, its structure and dynamics, the sociology of religion may make a formidable contribution to the general effort of the social sciences to understand the inner forces of our society”.[1]

On 14^th November 2018, an independent working group from the Scottish Parliament published a report exploring sectarianism in Scotland. While the language of sectarianism is commonly used across Scotland, it lacks a formal definition in Scots law. As scholars of sectarianism will attest, efforts to define sectarianism have provoked widespread debate leading some to view sectarianism as an essentially contested concept. The introduction to the working group’s report describes sectarianism as a “persistent intersectional issue”, a phenomenon originating in religious division but also drawing in other identities ranging from race, ethnicity, class, geographic location, and football allegiance. Those who have watched football (soccer) games between the two main Glasgow teams – Rangers and Celtic – are all too aware of the sectarian nature of the rivalry, which is mapped onto complex identity markers

As the Scottish working group observes, the intersectionality of sectarianism and its amorphous manifestation in and across political, social, and economic life raises a range of challenges with regard to understanding the manifestation of acts of violence or xenophobia inspired by sectarian difference. Such instances of sectarian difference are not restricted to Scotland and Christianity, but rather occur within and across faith communities, in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and also in the context of national identities, where faith plays a role.

The etymology of the concept of sectarianism points to deviation from a collective whole. Historically, Max Weber’s concept of the sect served as a starting point for intellectual inquiry, distinguishing sect from the church through type of membership: one is born into a church but joins a sect. Scholars of the Sociology of Religion, such as Peter Berger, H. Richard Niebuhr, Ernst Troeltsch, and Gerardus van dear Leeuw, have all engaged with Weber’s remarks, seeking to develop the concept, focussing on phenomenology, epistemology, metaphysics and other philosophical lines of inquiry in the process. At the heart of these approaches are different forms of boundary making in order to distinguish between church and sect. Whilst undeniably influential, this body of work struggles to understand sectarianism beyond the Christian tradition, beyond the abstract engagement with boundary making and the engagement between sect and world.[2] In Islam, for example, the organisation of the faith – which differs from the hierarchical structure of the Christian church – and existence of different madhab (schools of orthodox thought) means that sectarianism takes different forms from that presented by Weber and those who followed him.

Whilst questions of faith play an important role in understanding sectarian difference, the intersectional nature of such tensions mean that to understand the emergence, evolution and contestation of sectarian identities requires a reflection on political, legal, social, spatial and economic factors that also shape the lives of those who belong to such communities. Sectarian identities carry personal meaning, resonating across both the social world and the more formal areas of political life. Yet such identities are also deeply intersectional, meaning that sectarianism cannot be understood independent of the broader social, political or economic worlds within which they operate.

Put another way, context matters. In acknowledging this, we position sectarian identities within the complex rhythms of local, national and international politics, which are determined by the contingencies of life within such arenas. Yet as Doreen Massey acknowledges when reflecting on the importance of a spatial approach, the “intimately tiny” aspects of local politics are also conditioned by the broader hegemonic factors of global capitalism and international politics.[3] The rise of identity politics as a key feature of national and international politics has opened an array of different cleavages between and within communal groups. These cleavages can cut across class, ideology, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and sect, often in an intersectional manner. The idea of identity politics reflects membership of a constituency that is based upon shared experiences of injustice and ordered around efforts to challenge discrimination and marginalisation.

Central to this discussion are questions of boundary making and efforts to understand the ways in which communal difference is (re)produced, transcended and contested. Understanding the process of boundary making – defining those who are included and those who are excluded – has serious implications for the political community and everyday life in the state. For example, in Kuwait, members of the bidoon community are considered stateless, excluded from political life and the social goods that the state provides.

While the emergence of approaches, such as Critical Race Theory, have provided scholars with the theoretical tools to engage with questions brought up by identity politics, more work is needed understanding the ways in which identities intersect with one another, how lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn, how identities and communal relations evolve over time, and how identities relate to the broader collective.

It is here where the concept of sectarianism can offer valuable insight in understanding identity politics. Although the concept of sectarianism has historically been used in a purely religious context to denote deviation from a collective whole, its ability to understand the process of boundary making within a collective whole means that the concept provides a useful analytical approach to the study of identity politics. This application ranges from communal difference in Scotland, Northern Ireland and across the Middle East, where intra-religious tensions have become increasingly prominent, particularly in media coverage of regional politics.

Sectarianism in the Middle East

In the decade after the Arab Uprisings of 2011, violence across the Middle East has caused close to one million deaths with a further 28 million people displaced from their homes.[4] Efforts to understand this violence in both public discourse and the academy have regularly reduced conflict to a consequence of sectarian difference. Although the vast majority of the Middle East’s 450 million people are Sunni – and all but three of the region’s Muslim majority states are majority Sunni – sizeable Shi’a minorities exist in states across the region, many of whom have experienced forms of discrimination and marginalisation in the recent past. Yet sectarian difference and relations between Sunni and Shi’a is context specific, products of the complexities and contingencies of life in particular places. Moreover, to speak of homogenous Sunni and/or Shi’a populations misses a great deal of complexity, including doctrinal difference, ethnicity, ideology, political stance, class, and geopolitical affiliation.

Although the concept of sectarianism features prominently in media coverage of Middle Eastern politics, scant attention has been paid to understanding the ways in which sectarian difference emerges, evolves over time, or is contested. Instead, the “spectre of sectarianism” is regularly posited as something haunting the Middle East, shaping policy engagement in the process. In media and policy circles, sectarianism is regularly viewed as a product of “ancient hatreds” dating back to the Battle of Karbala in 680, a position articulated by President Barack Obama in the 2016 State of the Union.[5]

Such an approach suggests that relations between Sunni and Shi’a have remained hostile across time and space, ignoring 1,400 years of history and the complexity and contingency of local context. Although sectarianism emerges from theological difference, closer examination of interactions between Sunni and Shi’a reveals schisms between heterogenous forms of Sunni and Shi’a identities, which are given meaning by political, legal, urban, economic, geographic, ethnic, and tribal factors. As a result, sectarian tensions differ across space and time, conditioned by context, contingency, and the interplay of local and regional politics. Sectarian identities are fundamentally intersectional, conditioned by the rhythms of time and place. Understanding these rhythms is fundamental in gaining more nuanced awareness of the impact of sectarian difference on violence across the Middle East, and of everyday lives more broadly.

A common factor inherent within sectarian tensions is the manipulation of communal difference by those in positions of power.[6] As relations between rulers and ruled faced increased pressure following the Arab Uprisings, the manipulation and mobilisation of sect-based identities became an increasingly common tactic as elites sought to consolidate and retain power.[7] These processes of manipulation and mobilisation have had devastating implications for societies and states, resulting in violence, repression, and war.[8] It is here where understanding sectarianism as a form of boundary making becomes incredibly valuable.

Studying sectarianism

In recent years, academic debate on sectarianism has moved beyond the stilted ‘primordialist’ – ‘instrumentalist’ – ‘third ways’ approach, to offer more nuanced appreciation of the ways in which sectarian identities operate in the Middle East.[9] In doing so, scholars have begun to position sectarian identities within the broader intersectionality of identity politics.[10] Whilst compelling, these approaches are often constrained by disciplinary or geographical analysis.[11]

Acknowledging the complexity of the concept – which often leaves people talking past one another – some, such as Fanar Haddad, have argued for the term sectarianism to be discarded, in favour of a “more coherent lexical framework” which allows for a delineation of what aspect of the group is of interest. Put another way, Haddad suggests using the term sectarian as “a modifier relating to sects or the relationships between or within them: sectarian identity, sectarian unity, sectarian mobilisation, and so forth”.[12]

Whilst certainly compelling, Haddad’s call for a more coherent framework risks throwing the baby out with the bath water. Instead, as this report shall demonstrate, the concept of sectarianism allows for implicit and explicit recognition of the processes of boundary making across time and space. Such boundary making requires navigating the complex interplay of different (intersectional) identities and the ways in which boundaries are (re)produced and contested over time. This report seeks to contribute to these developments on communal difference by using the concept of sectarianism as a means of understanding the construction, reproduction and contestation of boundaries over time and place.

[1] Berger, Peter. The Sociological Study of Sectarianism, Social Research 51, no. 1/2 (1984): 367.

[2] Ibid, p380

[3] Massey. Doreen. 2005. For space. London, UK: Sage Publications.

[4] Editorial, The Guardian view on the Arab Spring, a decade on: a haunting legacy, The Guardian, January 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/29/the-guardian-view-on-the-arab-spring-a-decade-on-a-haunting-legacy; Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, A decade of displacement in the Middle East and North Africa, February 2021, https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/IDMC_MenaReport_final.pdf

[5] The Obama White House, President Obama’s 2016 State of the Union Address, Medium, January 2016, https://medium.com/@ObamaWhiteHouse/president-obama-s-2016-state-of-the-union-address-7c06300f9726

[6] Hashemi, Nader and Postel, Danny. 2017. Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (eds). London UK: Hurst.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Mabon, Simon. 2020. Houses built on sand: Violence, sectarianism and revolution in the Middle East. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

[9] Valbjorn, Morten. Beyond the Beyond(s): On the (many) third way(s) beyond primordialism and instrumentalism in the study of sectarianism. Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1 (2020): 91-107. See for an overview of stilted academic debates.

[10] See, for example: Mikdashi, Maya. 2022. Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

[11] See, for example: Matthiesen, Toby. 2014. The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[12] Haddad, Fanar. ‘Sectarianism’ and its discontents in the Study of the Middle East. Middle East Journal 71, no. 3 (2017):363-382., p381.

Topics

Brexit

Civil Society

Conflict Resolution and Security

Democracy and Elections

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Human Rights

International Relations and Geopolitics

Regions

Asia

East Asia

India

Indonesia

Japan

Malaysia

South Asia

Thailand

Europe

Northern Ireland

United Kingdom

Middle East and North Africa

Lebanon

United States and Canada

United States

Can national unity cure sectarian division? The potential pitfalls of nationalist protest discourses

Article by Anne Kirstine Rønn

What can foster peace and unity in societies that are deeply divided along sectarian lines? And what may lead to a reimagining of the political role of sectarian divides? These questions have received increasing attention among academics, policy makers, activists, and donor organisations in recent years, particularly in the wake of a series of large popular protest movements directed against sectarian political elites in countries such as Bahrain, Iraq, and Lebanon. These protests may contribute to foster stability and political transformation in the long run. To do so, however, their main challenge is to promote alternative identity categories such as nationalism and collective issues that can unify the population across sects and other social divides.[1] The purpose of this essay is to explore the pitfalls and risks associated with using discourses of nationalism to unite citizens against sectarian elites.

The recent decade’s anti-sectarian protest movements across divided societies in the Middle East suggest that appeals to a collective national identity can serve as a powerful weapon against sectarian divides and antagonism.[2] In fact, visions of nationhood have formed the basis of some of the most popular slogans and discourses in these movements. In the Bahraini uprising in 2011, protesters famously chanted that they were “not Shi’a, not Sunni, just Bahrainis”. In the so-called Tishreen Movement, which swept across Iraq in October 2019, a main slogan was, “we want a homeland”. In the Lebanese October Uprising, which took place at the same time, an estimated million people gathered in streets and squares to display the unity of the Lebanese people. The national anthem was played from large sound systems, and the Lebanese flag was painted on city walls across the country. In all three cases, the national flag was turned into a symbol of joint resistance against sectarianism and oppression.

This essay informs discussions about the potential of nationalist protest discourses by examining these in a critical light. While nationalist discourses may contribute to counter sectarianism, they do not present a miracle cure for sectarian divides. Rather, I argue, appeals to nationalism are associated with a series of pitfalls, which observers of contentious politics in divided societies must be attentive to.

The essay uses the Lebanese October Uprising as a case to illustrate these pitfalls, drawing on findings from field research and interviews with Lebanese activists as well as insights from research publications and other secondary sources. It begins with a brief overview of theoretical works on nationalism and sectarianism, which presents three potential pitfalls associated with using nationalist discourses as weapon against sectarianism. This is followed by a discussion of these pitfalls in relation to the Lebanese October Uprising. Finally, the essay concludes with a discussion of how these pitfalls may be addressed.

The scholarly debates on nationalism, sectarianism and de-sectarianisation: Three criticisms

Recent years’ studies of sectarianism, de-sectarianisation and identity politics in divided societies have provided important contributions to nuancing the understanding of nationalism in these settings. Altogether, these studies emphasise that nationalist narratives can take multiple forms, many of which are based on exclusive, authoritarian, patriarchal, racist, sexist and antagonist visions of nationhood.[3] Consequently, nationalism is not, per se, democratic and secular. Neither, is it the polar opposite of sectarianism. Rather, envisions of nationalism and national identity often carry sectarian connotations.[4] As Rima Majed emphasises, Arab nationalism has been associated with a Sunni overtone, while Lebanese nationalism has historically been linked with a Christian identity.[5] Moreover, as Raymond Hinnebusch observes, certain forms of nationalism may be exclusionary towards ethnic minorities such as Kurds.[6] Finally, authoritarian regimes often use nationalist narratives against democratic opposition figures, presenting them as a ‘sectional’ interest, which constitutes a threat to the integrity of the nation.[7] This all makes it relevant to critically scrutinise the content of such nationalist discourses and ask “whose nation” they represent[8]

Taking the above insights as point of departure, one can identify three potential pitfalls of nationalist discourses as weapons against sectarianism within the context of popular anti-sectarian protests. The first pitfall is that nationalist discourses may draw a boundary between members and non-members of the state and thus contribute to othering or excluding non-nationals. In contexts where racist and xenophobic attitudes are already socially and politically salient, there is also a significant risk that strong nationalist sentiments may reinforce hostile attitudes against migrants, refugees, or other ethnic minorities. The second pitfall is that protest movements fail to define the content of their nationalist discourse. As there is often no shared sense of nationalism in divided societies, nationalist myths and symbols may become empty and politically passive. The third potential pitfall is linked to the fact that discourses of nationalism can easily be co-opted and distorted by political elites to serve sectarian agendas. A good example is Bahrain, where Shiite protesters and regime challengers were framed as Iranian fifth columnists serving the foreign policy agenda of Tehran.[9] In the following section, I discuss whether and how these pitfalls could be observed in the Lebanese October Uprising.

Pitfalls of nationalist discourses in Lebanon’s October uprising

The Lebanese October Uprising, which broke out on October 17^th 2019, is the largest mobilisation against sectarian politics in Lebanon. The uprising was triggered by a proposed tax on WhatsApp amidst a severe economic crisis. However, it also directed an explicit critique against the country’s political system, which is based on sectarian power sharing and has contributed to concentrate power in the hands of a small elite, many of whom are former warlords.[10] As mentioned above, nationalist slogans and symbols were omnipresent in the Uprising. Hence, the uprising provides a suitable case for discussing the potential pitfalls of nationalist protest discourses. Before turning to the downsides of these discourses in the uprising, it is important to note that many protesters and observers celebrated the appeals to national unity. My fieldwork data as well as secondary material suggest that the uprising’s nationalist narrative was largely seen as inclusive by protesters and presented as a contrast to the sectarian discourses, which had been promoted by the political elites for decades. However, as I elaborate below, the three pitfalls of nationalist discourses could also be identified in the uprising.

Limiting space for addressing the rights non-Lebanese

Nationalist discourses arguably made it more difficult to include calls for the rights of non-nationals living in Lebanon and failed to address problems with xenophobia and racism in the country. Lebanon is home to about one million Syrian refugees, 200,000 Palestinians and about 250,000 migrant workers many of whom work in private households. The situation of the many non-Lebanese has become increasingly dire amid the recent years’ economic crisis. Moreover, non-Lebanese, particularly Syrian and Palestinian refugees have been exposed to racist and xenophobic discourses. More specifically, Lebanese sectarian politicians have long presented a form of nationalism, which rejects the rights of non-Lebanese in the country, with refugees particularly targeted. This anti-refugee discourse was exemplified in a number of tweets posted by Gebran Bassil, former Foreign Minister and son-in-law of Lebanon’s President just a few months before the uprising broke out. These tweets, which sparked a storm on social media, were interpreted as an indirect encouragement for Lebanese employers not to hire Palestinian or Syrian refugees.[11]

However, demands for the rights of non-Lebanese and calls against xenophobia played a minor role in the uprising. As one activist observed, “Most protesters, truth be told, are simply not thinking about refugees at all.”[12] This observation was echoed by several organisers I interviewed as part of my doctoral research. Interestingly, organisers stressed that they deliberately chose not to bring up rights of non-Lebanese, particularly refugees. The dominant discourse of nationalist unity, several of them believed, stood in the way for addressing rights of these groups. The point is also evident in a comment by investigative journalist, Lara Bitar: “Unfortunately, very little space has been made for migrant workers and refugees and I hope that will change. I’m also not too fond of the hyper-nationalist sentiment that’s overtaken public spaces and hope for more conversations around it.”[13]

Furthermore, the hyper-nationalism Bitar refers to, may also have made refugees less inclined to join the protests or lose hope that the movement would lead to an improvement of their conditions. In a study of perceptions of the uprising among Lebanese and non-Lebanese residents of Tripoli, Dahrouge et al. found that Syrian respondents did not see the potential for improvement in their conditions, as the demands were mainly targeting the basic living rights of the Lebanese people.[14] Moreover, 53 per cent of Lebanese respondents in their survey shared the opinion that people with other nationalities should not participate in the protests. Finally, there were indications that refugees were anxious about racism and xenophobia in the uprising. In Tripoli, for instance, water and first aid items were left for protesters by Syrian refugees in the city, asking for protesters not to be racist.[15]

The depoliticising effect of nationalist celebrations

The risk of nationalism becoming an empty and politically ‘impotent’ approach was addressed in several critical analyses of the October Uprising. For instance, Halawi and Salloukh argue that the uprising gradually mutated into a national carnival.[16] Imagining a national community, they contend, is one thing. Real political change, however, is an altogether different challenge. This point speaks to a wider critique, which was raised by organisers both during and after the uprising, stressing that the carnivalesque atmosphere and the musical performances with flags and nationalist songs, despite being highly popular, also distracted people from discussing substantial political topics. Protesters I interviewed during my fieldwork in Lebanon also expressed frustration that these performances took up the media’s main attention, distracting focus from the political deliberation that took place in the square. Indeed, looking at domestic and international media coverage, some of the most covered events included a human chain from north to South Lebanon and mass DJ concerts in the main square of Lebanon’s second largest city, Tripoli. During my fieldwork in Lebanon in 2021, around two years after the uprising, many interlocutors described the uprising as a missed opportunity for creating clear alternatives to sectarian politics. While it would be incorrect to attribute this shortcoming to the use of nationalist discourses alone, the October Uprising nevertheless illustrates that visions of nationhood can be difficult to translate into political opposition projects.

Co-optation of nationalist discourses

Several political figures from opposing camps used nationalist discourses in their counter narratives against the uprising, seeking to present themselves as protectors of Lebanon. When Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah took a stance against the uprising, he claimed to do so in the interest of the Lebanese nation. In a speech on October 25^th, he stated that he intended to protect the country from a vacuum, which would lead to chaos, collapse and ultimately civil war.[17] When announcing his resignation in a televised speech on October 29^th former Prime Minister Hariri stated that “No one’s bigger than the nation”.[18] Moreover, several politicians and their affiliated media outlets sought to portray the uprising as a dangerous movement backed by foreign powers to drag Lebanon into open conflict.[19] These examples illustrate how discourses of nationalism are fragile to co-option and manipulation by political elites. Overall, one can argue that the October Uprising turned into a battle between civic and sectarian discourses of nationhood.

Ways of addressing the pitfalls of nationalism

This essay has explored the pitfalls and risks associated with using discourses of nationalism to challenge sectarian politics in divided societies. While nationalist narratives have been a powerful tool against sectarian division in popular protest movements from Bahrain to Lebanon, nationalism is not per se the opposite of sectarianism. The essay argues that discourses of national unity can be associated with three potential pitfalls: They may lead to othering of non-nationals, contribute to depoliticise movements, and become subject to co-option by sectarian elites. Protesters in the Lebanese October Uprising used a shared vision of nationhood to rally people against sectarian elites. However, the uprising also illustrates the pitfalls of nationalist discourses. This prompts the question how protest movements can promote forms of nationalism that are more inclusive, anti-racist, politically potent and resistant to co-optation. One way could be to combine nationalist narratives with stronger elements of rights-based discourses, stressing the importance of rule of law, good governance, and individual rights.[20] In fact, groups in the Lebanese October Uprising already sought to do so. However, coming up with a shared rights-based approach to nationalism is not easy, given the lack of consensus on questions such as the right to civil marriage and same-sex-relationships. Another strategy could be to promote a form of nationalism which is informed by a political ideology, e.g. socialism as discussed by John Nagle.[21] Finally, a potential strategy could be to downplay the national identity in favor of a shared identity as citizens living within the same state.

Anne Kirstine Rønn is based at Aarhus University, Denmark and has been a SEPAD fellow since 2019. Her research focuses on contentious politics in divided societies, sectarianism and de-sectarianization. In her PhD dissertation, she explores challenges to solidarity in the 2019 Lebanese October Uprising.

[1] Baumann, Hannes. (2011). Introduction: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Arab Revolutions. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11, no.3, (2011): 509-512. Nagle, John. 2016. Social Movements in violently divided societies: Constructing conflict and peacebuilding. London, UK: Routledge. Valbjørn, Morten. Countering Sectarianism: The Many Paths, Promises, and Pitfalls of De-sectarianization. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 18, no. 1, (2020): 12-22.

[2] Dodge, Toby, & Mansour, Renad. Sectarianization and De-sectarianization in the Struggle for Iraq’s Political Field. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 18, no. 1, (2020): 58-69. Ismail, Salwa. The Syrian uprising: Imagining and performing the nation. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11, no. 3, (2011): 538-549.

[3] Nagle, Social Movements in violently divided societies.

[4] Haddad, Fanar. Sectarian identity and national identity in the Middle East. Nations and Nationalism, 26, no. 1, (2020): 123-137.

[5] Rima Majed, Lebanon and Iraq in 2019 Revolutionary uprisings against ‘sectarian neoliberalism’, TNI Longreads (Transnational Institute), October 2021, https://longreads.tni.org/lebanon-and-iraq-in-2019

[6] Hinnebusch, Raymond. (2020). Identity and state formation in multi‐sectarian societies: Between nationalism and sectarianism in Syria. Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1, (2020): 138-154.

[7] Baumann, Hannes. Introduction: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Arab Revolutions. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11, no. 3, (2011): 509-512.

[8] Valbjørn, Morten. Countering Sectarianism: The Many Paths, Promises, and Pitfalls of De-sectarianization. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 18, no. 1, (2020): 12-22.

[9] Mabon, Simon. Protest, Sects, and the Potential for Power‐Sharing in Bahrain. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2, (2020): 161-168.

[10] Kraidy, Marwan M. The Lebanese Rise Up Against a Failed System. Current history 118, no. 812, (2019): 361-363. Salloukh, Bassel F., Barakat, Rabie, Al-Habbal, Jinan S., Khattab, Lara W., & Mikaelian, Shoghig 2015. Politics of sectarianism in postwar Lebanon. London, UK: Pluto Press.

[11] The New Arab, Lebanese demand foreign minister’s sacking over racist tweets, June 2019, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/lebanese-demand-foreign-ministers-sacking-over-racist-tweets

[12] Imogen Lambert, Refugees in Lebanon watch protests with hope and caution, The New Arab, October 2019, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2019/10/22/refugees-in-lebanon-watch-protests-with-hope-and-caution

[13] Miriam Younes and Lara Bitar, “New Ways of Relating to Each Other” Lara Bitar discusses Lebanon’s ongoing protest movement, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, December 2019, https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/41305/new-ways-of-relating-to-each-other

[14] Dahrouge, Elias, Nammour, Jihad, Lotf, Ahmed Samy, Abualroos, Karim., Ait Youssef, Iasmin, Al-Burbar, Eman, Benyahya, Khawla et al. The 17 October 2019 protests in Lebanon: Perceptions of Lebanese and non-Lebanese residents of Tripoli and surroundings. Global Campus of Human Rights 4, no. 1-2, (2020).

[15] Imogen Lambert, Refugees in Lebanon watch protests with hope and caution, The New Arab, October 2019, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2019/10/22/refugees-in-lebanon-watch-protests-with-hope-and-caution

[16] Halawi, Ibrahim, & Salloukh, Bassel F. Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will after the 17 October Protests in Lebanon. Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 3, (2020): 322-334.

[17] Tom Perry and Eric Knecht, Hezbollah warns of chaos, civil war in Lebanon, Reuters, October 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-protests-scuffles-idUSKBN1X41IV

[18] Vivian Yee, Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, Steps Down in Face of Protests, The New York Times, October 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/world/middleeast/saad-hariri-stepping-down-lebanon.html

[19] Kareem Chehayeb, Narrative wars: Lebanon’s media take shots at popular protests, Middle East Eye, November 2019, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/information-wars-mar-lebanons-popular-uprising

[20] Mabon, Simon. Desectarianization: Looking Beyond the Sectarianization of Middle Eastern Politics. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, no. 4, (2019): 23-35.

[21] Nagle, Social Movements in violently divided societies.

Topics

Civil Society

Conflict Resolution and Security

Democracy and Elections

Regions

Middle East and North Africa

Lebanon

Northern Ireland: Still a deeply divided society?

Article by Professor John Nagle

Northern Ireland is often described as a ‘deeply divided society’, yet it is recognised that religious difference – Catholic and Protestant – is not the main source of political polarisation.[1] The peace process and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA) primarily recognised the ethnonational character of antagonistic divisions. The institutions of the Agreement thus place emphasis on accommodating rival claims to national self-determination – Irish unity or UK unionism – and giving parity of esteem to the identities that underlie these ethnonationalist aspirations.[2]

Yet, as one major report published in 2019 concludes, ‘sectarianism remains a serious issue’ in post-Agreement Northern Ireland ‘despite strenuous and continuing efforts on the part of government, voluntary organisations and others to deal with its many manifestations’.[3]

What, then, is sectarianism in Northern Ireland? To what extent has the post-Agreement power-sharing framework acted to either ameliorate or exacerbate sectarianism? And, does sectarian difference adequately capture a society increasingly characterised by hybrid identities and agonistic positions vis-à-vis Northern Ireland’s constitutional position?

Sectarianism

Ethnonationalism – while capturing contested expressions of political sovereignty – appears to be inescapable from religion. Religious affiliation continues to have a strong overlap with political and constitutional preferences. The national census is invariably read through the skewed mathematics of sectarian headcounting since it is assumed that a high percentage of Catholics support unity and an equal proportion of Protestants favour maintenance of the union. Elections also tend to be de facto sectarian censuses with the nationalist and unionist political parties drawing their support largely from either the Protestant or Catholic sections of society.[4] More than 90 per cent of Northern Ireland’s children are educated in schools that are largely segregated along religious lines and 94 per cent of Belfast’s public housing is segregated.[5]

The role that religion plays in shaping ethnonational identities and boundaries is debated in scholarly literature. Certainly, religious animus has historically animated sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland and consequent formation of Northern Ireland in 1921 was purposely designed to ensure a two-thirds sectarian majority of Protestant unionists over Catholic nationalists. Sectarian rhetoric was instrumentalised by political leaders as a means to demonise the ‘other’ and to present themselves as defenders of their group. Religion, in this sense, was fused with ethonationalism. For instance, the primary appeal of Dr Ian Paisley, the leader of both Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Presbyterian Church, played ‘on political and ethnic-national interests based around the antinomies of Britishness (against Irishness) and Protestantism (against Catholicism)’.[6]

Such appeals to sectarian animosity are rarely if at all made today from the established political parties. No serious scholar or policymaker can credibly frame sectarianism in Northern Ireland though the risibly simplistic frame of ancient hatreds of primordial clashed of religious identity that bedevils analyses of conflict in the Middle East.

To understand sectarianism in Northern Ireland is to view the key issues that drive division and antagonism. To return to the beginning, the main cleavage in Northern Ireland is mutually exclusive forms of national self-determination. This dynamic fuelled the conflict known as the Troubles, resulting in 3,500 deaths and in the region of 100,000 serious injuries.[7] Political and social divisions unsurprisingly were intensified in this period, particularly in relation to political polarisation and residential segregation.

The peace process has seen this conflict move away from political violence to expressions of identity, culture, and community being the main ground for dispute. Group based rights have become ‘war by other means’ as nationalist and unionist political demand public recognition and parity of esteem for their respective identities. Sectarianism and sectarian difference are increasingly mediated through conflicts over flags symbols, language equality, and parades.[8]

This turn to group rights as a fundamental line of contestation is best understood as being facilitated by the architecture and language of the Good Friday Agreement. As noted earlier, the Agreement acknowledges not only the legitimacy of rival claims to national belonging; it further stresses the importance of parity of esteem to nationalist and unionist identities. This emphasis on multiculturalism and recognition of different identities is notably challenging in a divided society defined by mutually exclusive claims to statehood. The ultimate form of recognition for groups in divided societies is to have their demand for national self-determination legitimated. With reference to Bourdieu and Wacquant, conflicts of self-determination revolve around the defence of symbolic capital which is only of value within the ethnonational group.[9] Contending claims to self-determination represent zero-sum conflicts to declare the group’s symbolic capital as the only valid currency in the constitution of the state. The main ethnonationalist groups thus construct not only different myth-symbol complexes, but modes of symbolic expression that are largely constituted in antagonism to the ‘other’. Thus demands for one group’s symbolic capital is likely to be seen by the other group as a threat to its legitimacy.[10]

This has certainly been the case in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Ulster unionists, whose symbolic culture dominated the state from its inception, view the Agreement as inexorably leading to a process in which their cultural capital is eroded by nationalists.[11] A notable example of this was the 2012 protests in Belfast after a motion by Belfast City Council to restrict the flying of the union flag to designated days. The protests, which lasted over four months, resulted in injuries to 160 police officers and 34 rioters receiving custodial sentences.[12] A proposed Irish Language Act to give the Irish language equal status to English in Northern Ireland are opposed by the main unionist parties, who have accused nationalists of ‘using the Irish language as a tool to beat Unionism over the head’. Sectarianism, rather than an expression of religious intolerance, is fundamentally expressed in terms of the cultural and political identities of ethnonationalism.

As part of this post-Agreement culture war over identity new issues have emerged as dividing lines. Most notably, contestation has arisen over LGBTQ rights. Despite the minimal attention to sexuality in the GFA, it is notable that LGBTQ rights increasingly assumed an important area of dispute within the power-sharing assembly. On five occasions between 2012 and 2019 Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Assembly has voted on same-sex legislation and on each occasion the vote has exposed ethnonational cleavages. In particular, while Irish nationalist parties and political representatives have largely voted in support of legalising same-sex marriage, Ulster Unionists have broadly opposed the motion and have used their veto power permitted within power-sharing to stymie such legislation.[13]

Rather than explain differences in relation to same-sex marriage as purely the product of the relationship of some unionist parties to protestant evangelicalism, it must be understood within the context of ethnonational polarisation. The term ‘sextarianism’ captures how sexual difference has increasingly become bound up with expressions of sectarian difference.[14] LGBTQ rights are thus a co-opted issue used as part of a broader culture war.

This demonstrates that sectarianism in Northern Ireland is not simply a marker of immutable ethnoreligious characteristics, but is instead a form of constant boundary marking in which practically anything can become a signal for difference and contestation.

Most significantly, Brexit has developed into a deeply polarising issue in Northern Ireland. Although the majority of people in Northern Ireland voted remain, the vote broadly mapped onto political identities, with nationalist parties supporting remain and unionists supporting the leave campaign.[15] Brexit has become particularly divisive in Northern Ireland over the issue of the Protocol as a mechanism to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and to make sure of the integrity of the EU’s single market for goods. The protocol is intensely opposed by unionists who see this it as creating an effective border across the Irish Sea thus undermining Northern Ireland’s place within the UK.[16]

The rise of the ‘Others’

While the GFA fundamentally sought to recognise nationalist/unionist identities and claims to self-determination, it also makes provisions for those people who identify as neither nationalist or unionist and/or both British and Irish. Public opinion surveys have demonstrated an upward trajectory of people in Northern Ireland who define themselves as ‘neither’ unionist nor nationalist. In fact, the largest plurality of identification (circa 40 per cent) is now this ‘neither’ category.[17] According to the 2021 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, 27 per cent of the population also claim to have no religion. The rise of the ‘neithers’ indicates a population that is increasingly open to complex social and political identities. To an extent, this is reflected in the recent breakthrough of the non-sectarian Alliance Party, which won 17 seats in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, more than doubling its tally from 2017.[18] Yet, despite the emergence of ‘neithers’ and non-sectarian parties, it would be mistaken to assume that this represents the settlement of Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. The ascendency of the nationalist Sinn Fein as the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly will fuel momentum for a so-called ‘border poll’ on Irish unity.

John Nagle is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focusses on social movements and divided societies. His most recent book is Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Postwar Lebanon (co-authored with Tamirace Fakhoury).

[1] McGarry, John and O’Leary, Brendan. 1995. Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images. Oxford: Wiley.

[2] Nagle, John. Between conflict and peace: An analysis of the complex consequences of the Good Friday Agreement. Parliamentary Affairs 71, no. 2 (2018): 395-416.

[3] Duncan Morrow, Sectarianism in Northern Ireland: A Review, Queen’s University Belfast, December 2018, https://niopa.qub.ac.uk/bitstream/NIOPA/11958/1/A-Review-Addressing-Sectarianism-in-Northern-Ireland_FINAL.pdf

[4] Evans, Jocelyn and Tonge, Jonathan. ‘Social Class and Party Choice in Northern Ireland’s Ethnic Blocs’. West European Politics, no. 32, (2009): 1012–1030.

[5] Morrow, Sectarianism in Northern Ireland.

[6] Brewer, John and Higgins, Gareth. 1998. Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: The Mote and the Beam. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

[7] Morrissey, Mike and Smyth, Marie. 2002. Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement: Victims, Grievance, and Blame. London, UK: Pluto Press.

[8] Nagle, John. From the Politics of Antagonistic Recognition to Agonistic Peace Building: An Exploration of Symbols and Rituals in Divided Societies’. Peace & Change 39, no. 4, (2014): 468-494.

[9] Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loic. Symbolic Capital and Social Classes. Journal of Classical Sociology, 13, no. 2, (2013): 292-302.

[10] Nagle, From the Politics.

[11] McAuley, James W. and Tonge, Jonathan. ‘Britishness (and Irishness) in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement’, Parliamentary Affairs, no. 63, (2010): 266–285.

[12] Nolan, Paul, Bryan, Dominic, Dwyer, Clare, Hayward, Katy, Radford, Katy, and Shirlow, Peter. 2014. The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest, Belfast, NI: Queen’s University Belfast. Northern Ireland Office (1998) Agreement Reached in the Multi–Party Negotiations. Belfast, HMSO

[13] Hayes, Bernadette and Nagle, John. Ethnonationalism and Attitudes Towards Gay Rights in Northern Ireland. Nations and Nationalism, no. 22, (2016): 20–41.

[14] Maginn, Paul J., and Ellison, Graham. ‘Ulster Says No’: Regulating the consumption of commercial sex spaces and services in Northern Ireland. Urban Studies 54, no. 3 (2017): 806-821.

[15] Gormley-Heenan, Cathy, and Arthur Aughey. Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 3 (2017): 497-511.

[16] BBC, Brexit: What is the Northern Ireland Protocol?, June 2022, www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53724381

[17] Hayward, Katy, Komarova, Milena, & Rosher, Ben. 2022. Political Attitudes in Northern Ireland after Brexit and under the Protocol. Belfast, NI: Queen’s University of Belfast.

[18] Cera Murtagh, Northern Ireland is politically divided. Maybe that’s changing, Washington Post, June 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/14/northern-ireland-alliance-party-union-republican/

Topics

Regions

Europe

United Kingdom

Demanding radical hope for peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Article by Dr Giulia Carabelli

The concepts of sectarianism and ethno-nationalism are used to describe not only the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) but also to qualify issues emerging from decades of failed attempts at post-war reconciliation, which are understood in terms of religious and ethnic antagonisms. This means that the process of settling the conflict aims at ‘fostering dialogue’ between actors whose identities are perceived as always conflictual. Clearly, once group identities are normalised as homogeneous, stable, and threatened/ing the demand for peacebuilding centres on a system capable of ensuring equal and fair representation. Consociationalism has become the preferred choice in such post-conflict scenarios because of how it empowers communities across ethnic lines, and thus guaranteeing that political power and decision-making is equally distributed (on consociationalism in B-H, see Merdzanovic).[1]

Yet consociationalism presents at least two major problems. Firstly, it distributes power among representatives of majority groups only. In the case of B-H, this means that individuals who are not (or do not want to identify as) Bosnian-Croat and Catholic, Bosnian-Serb and Orthodox or Bosniak and Muslim are deprived of political representation falling into the loose category of ‘others’.[2] Secondly, the power-sharing infrastructure (designed to prevent/settle ethnic tensions) strengthens the very borders between communities that peacebuilding projects aim at making porous.[3] This is because political power depends on the strengthening of divisive lines. More so, there is little incentive for those in power to transition to a different political system based on rules that won’t benefit careers built on ethnic antagonism. According to Merdzanovic, the imposed consociational democracy in B-H ‘promotes extremist rather than accommodative behaviour’.[4]

A cursory glance at official documents released by the High Representative (the European Union official leading the process of peace- and state-building in B-H) reveals anger and frustration at a political class unable to engage in dialogue, compromise, and negotiation across ethnic lines.[5] This lack of dialogue translates into political stagnancy, which interferes with desired plans for peacebuilding, democracy, EU membership and full independence from the international protectorate.

If peacebuilding seems to have failed with consociationalism at the state level, myriad initiatives targeting ‘the people’ of B-H explore the potential of bottom-up processes to encourage peace. Because peacebuilding works within the parameters of sectarianism, it cannot but promote the coming together of individuals who are always accounted for as members of ethnic communities. Thus, peacebuilding encourages inter-ethnic understanding, collaboration, and coexistence but it cannot deviate from an understanding of identities as sectarian and thus inherently antagonistic. So, for instance, these programmes often require that participants declare their ethnic belonging so that fair representation can be ensured with the aim of building bridges across ethnic divides.[6] Much critique of these peacebuilding programmes, largely sponsored by international organisations and foreign governments, highlights the limits of projects that cannot and are not interested in changing the system.[7] This type of peacebuilding is not driven by the vision of a shared future but rather as the process of learning to navigate sectarianism, or, at the very least, avoiding violent conflict. We can interpret this as mode of ‘resiliency’, or a coping stratagem for dealing with the reality of ethnic divisions. Yet, to coexist is not the same as to share, as it maintains those divisive lines that encircles homogeneous, stable ethno-national groups always imagined as conflictual.

In this essay, I look at peacebuilding from the grassroots to discuss the ways in which sectarianism is challenged within a system that perpetuates division. Firstly, I account for scholarship that focuses on the everyday to conceptualise how people make sense of ethnic division and enable spaces of coexistence that challenge understandings of ‘divided societies’ as hopelessly fragmented. Secondly, I account for grassroots attempts to reframe political conversations outside sectarianism. Specifically, I look at the 2014 mass protests in B-H and their legacy to comment on efforts to build peace on different terms. The aim of this essay is to discuss the potential of spaces where new ways of being together have emerged from re-configured identities that resist the automaticity of ethnic division. Instead, what is shared – including frustration, hope, and the desire to change the status quo – shapes ways of being/doing peace. I conclude this essay by asking whether we could envision peacebuilding as a more radical act, whose goal is to nurture hope for change rather than resilience.

Everyday life in ‘divided B-H’

The interest in everyday life stems from the desire to explore how people make sense of ethnic divisions in their most mundane activities. Everyday encounters cannot be fully predicted, thus the everyday is also a space for inconsistencies, or how contingency affects the ways we relate to each other and to politics. Azra Hromadzic’s book, Citizens of an empty nation, for example, dives in the lives of high schoolers in Mostar to observe and discuss the ways in which ethno-national belonging becomes divisive (or not).[8] She finds that young people date and mingle across ethnic lines but they know that, outside the safe space of the schools’ bathrooms, these relationships won’t survive. This shows how people navigate sectarianism across ethnic lines without openly challenging them and yet downplaying their normative value. In her ethnography of social spaces where people ‘mix’ in Mostar, Renata Summa explains how, once we stop privileging ethnic divisions as a framework to study ‘divided societies’, we begin to appreciate other ways of organising social life.[9] In fact, she finds that people in the everyday seem more concerned with differences between politicians and ordinary people, native and newcomers, and those who abide to sectarianism or do not. These lines of divisions tell us a lot about class, for example, with the old urban elites refusing to engage with sectarianism in the name of a cherished multicultural past. By exposing different lines of division, as Palmberger argues, we can ‘show complexities [but also] commonalities, shared past and presents that transcend ethno-national lines’.[10] In the everyday, sectarian boundaries are negotiated in ways that exceed ideological positioning, or, what Piacentini calls, ‘opportunistic alignments’.[11]

The everyday is also the space in which to study the dynamics between internationally led peacebuilding projects and local understandings of peace. Björkdahl and Gusic theorise these spaces as frictional peacebuilding.[12] In the everyday, international peacebuilding meets local practices in unpredictable ways, giving rise to resistance but also co-option. Friction, they write, creates ‘messy dynamics [..] unexpected coalitions built on “awkwardly linked incompatibles”’.[13] This is to say that top-down and bottom-up peacebuilding projects and practices co-exist and re-shape each other. To study the everyday allows us to appreciate the spontaneity of collaborative and inclusive practices that testify to the possibility of life together despite sectarianism.

Peacebuilding in grassroots activism

Whereas peace in the everyday is discussed in terms of how people adjust to make sense of the present depending on contingencies, grassroots activism reclaims politics from corruption and stalemate, forging a space energised by the hope of radical change. In other words, everyday offers potential for a space that enables coexistence mediated by contingency. From this angle, I look at activist spaces in which anti-sectarianism is intentionally (rather than accidentally) political. In exploring peacebuilding from the grassroots, my aim is also to highlight what other problems become apparent once we question sectarianism as the main problem of ‘divided societies’.

2013 and 2014 are remembered as the years of mass mobilisation in B-H. From February 2014, for two consecutive months, angry citizens occupied streets, squares and administrative buildings in cities and towns across B-H demanding change from corrupt political elites.[14] Global media described the protests as the moment in which people from B-H came together across ethnic lines against the ruling class: the common enemy.[15] After years of international peacebuilding with no definite sign of peace, these protests showed that people could descend into the streets together, moved by anger, frustration, and hope. The protests also demonstrated that people are not apathetic, as often argued, but rather that they lack spaces to engage meaningfully in political conversations overshadowed by sectarianism.

Off the streets, protesters gathered in the plenums – assemblies where horizontal modes of democratic participation were tested. This provided a space for people to voice their concerns – small or big – and for a diverse crowd to vote in order to prioritise the work of the collective. It wasn’t easy, and not without tensions, but, for many, it felt like finally someone was listening.[16]

These protests cannot be understood without accounting for the unrelenting work of activist networks that never ceased to nurture hope in liminal spaces outside mainstream political outlets. They cultivated the hope that things could change radically in a country often addressed as hopeless.[17] It is within these circles that people most strongly condemn how the hyper-focus on sectarianism has disincentivised political participation and thus the possibility for peacebuilding and reconciliation. This is because peace in these circles is not only understood as a matter of inter-ethnic dialogue but also as welfare and wellbeing. In Tuzla, where violent protests began in February 2014, factory workers had been long trying to gain attention after been made redundant by the privatisation of factories once owned by the Socialist state.[18] The protests showed that problems are not ‘ethnic’ but rather that of unemployment, gender discrimination, racism, nepotism, bullying… As Majstorović, Vučkovac and Pepić write, the legacy of the 2014 protests is that now ‘the divisiveness of ethno-national rhetoric is less successful at demobilising political opposition [because] the impoverishment of the people has politicised the economic restructuring [and] issues of social justice have become a constant presence in public discourse’.[19] In this sense, peacebuilding cannot be limited to preventing violent confrontation, or vague notions of ‘power sharing’, but must include a demand for a better life where flourishment is the goal and not survival.

What’s the use of sectarianism? Demanding radical hope for peacebuilding

In this essay, I looked at practices of peacebuilding that exceed planned intervention. I discussed how, in the everyday, people make sense of, downplay, or enact divisions that contingently reveal other, equally important, lines of division such as class. I also introduced the 2014 mass protests in B-H to account for grassroots activism as the space where hope for radical change is nurtured. By refusing to accept ethnicity as the only marker of one’s identity, grassroots activism can support conversations about poverty, unemployment, corruption, or mental health that are obscured by a hyper-focus on ethnic identity. In doing so, they reject discourses about resilience as the default mode to navigate immutable ‘divided societies’, and instead inhabit and cultivate spaces of hope: a more radical way to imagine the future. Thus, peacebuilding can also become more courageous and instead of building bridges between ethnic others, it can work with people to nurture dreams beyond sectarianism.

Giulia Carabelli is an urban and cultural sociologist interested in affect theory, grassroots activism, and everyday life. She is lecturer in social theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Giulia’s extensive ethnographic work in the city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has resulted in various publications on the possibility of social change in places of contestation and political stalemate. Her first book, The Divided City and the Grassroots, was published in 2018 by Palgrave.

[1] Merdzanovic, Adis. 2015. Democracy by decree. Prospects and limits of imposed consociational democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ibidem Press.

[2] Hromadžić, Azra. “Once we had a house” Invisible citizens and consociational democracy in post-war Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Social Analysis 63, no. 3, (2012): 30-48. Bell, Jared O. Dayton and the Political Rights of Minorities: Considering constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the acceptance of its membership application to the European Union. Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 17, no. 2, (2018): 17-46.

[3] Aitken, Rob. Cementing divisions? An assessment of the impact of international interventions and peace-building policies on ethnic identities and divisions. Policy Studies 28, no. 3, (2007): 247-267.

[4] Merdzanovic, Azra. “Imposed consociationalism”: external intervention and power sharing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Peacebuilding 5, no. 1, (2017): 22-35.

[5] European Commission, Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, Bosnia and Herzegovina Progress Report, October 2014, https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/bosnia-and-herzegovina-progress-report-2014_en; European Commission, Bosnia and Herzegovina Progress Report, October 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/bosnia_and_herzegovina_report_2020.pdf

[6] Carabelli, Giulia. 2018. The divided city and the grassroots. The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar. Singapore: Palgrave.

[7] Kappler, Stefanie and Richmond, Oliver. Peacebuilding and culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina: resistance or emancipation?. Security Dialogue 42, no. 3, (2011): 261-278.

[8] Hromadžić, A. 2015. Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

[9] Summa, Renata. Inventing places: disrupting the “divided city”. Space and Polity 23, no. 2, (2019): 140-153. Summa, Renata. 2021. Everyday boundaries, borders and post-conflict societies. Cham: Palgrave.

[10] Palmberger, Monika. Why alternative memory and place-making practices in divided cities matter. Space and Polity 23, no. 2, (2019): 243-249.

[11] Piacentini, Arianna. Making an identity choice: “opportunistic alignment” in and beyond consociational systems: evidence from South Tyrol and Bosnia Herzegovina. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 27, no. 4, (2021): 439-455.

[12] Björkdahl, Annika. Precarious peacebuilding: friction in global-local encounters. Peacebuilding 1, no. 3, (2013): 289-299.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Kurtović, Larisa. Conjuring “the people”. The 2013 Babylution protests and desire for political transformation in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 80, (2018): 43-62.

[15] Economist, Protests in Bosnia: On Fire, February 2014, https://www.economist.com/europe/2014/02/15/on-fire; Aleksandar Hemon and Jasmin Mujanović, Stray Dogs and Stateless Babies, New York Times, February 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/opinion/sunday/stray-dogs-and-stateless-babies.html; Soeren Keil, Whatever Happened to the Plenums in Bosnia?, Balkaninsight, June 2014, https://balkaninsight.com/2014/06/16/whatever-happened-to-the-plenums-in-bosnia/

[16] Arsenijević, Damir. 2014. Unbribable Bosnia Herzegovina. Baden-Baden (ed.), Germany: Nomos.

[17] Carabelli, Giulia. Love, activism, and the possibility of radical social change in Mostar. Space and Polity 23, no. 2, (2019): 182-196

[18] Emin Eminagić, Protests and Plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina, CITSEE BLOG, March 2004, http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/protests-and-plenums-bosnia-and-herzegovina; Milan, Chiara. 2017. Reshaping Citizenship through Collective Action: Performative and Prefigurative Practices in the 2013-2014 Cycle of Contention in Bosnia & Hercegovina. Europe Asia Studies 69, no. 9, (2017): 1346-1361. Milan, Chiara. 2020. Social mobilization beyond ethnicity. Civic activism and grassroots movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina. New York, US: Routledge.

[19] Majstorović, Danijela, Vučkovac, Zoran & Pepić, Aandela. From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15, no. 4, (2015): 661-68.

Topics

Civil Society

Conflict Resolution and Security

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Regions

Europe

The Balkans

Divided we stand: Intra-Muslim sectarianism and solidarity in post-Brexit Britain

Article by Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti

On 9^th June 2022, an obscure historical epic about the early years of Islam made headlines when leading UK film chain Cineworld made the decision to cancel all screenings in the wake of protests by Muslim groups.[1] The Lady of Heaven purports to tell the “untold story” of Lady Fatima, daughter to the Prophet Muhammed and wife of Ali, the man Shi’a Muslims (not Sunnis) believe was appointed as the first Islamic caliph. Critics say the film, which was written and produced in Britain by controversial Shi’a cleric Sheikh Yasser al-Habib, peddles an “extreme… sectarian narrative” and that it “sets out to damage relations and social cohesion between the various Muslim denominations”.[2] A petition calling for the film to be banned, started by Muslim media platform 5Pillars, had reached over 130,000 signatures as of 14^th June.[3] 5Pillars editor, Roshan Muhammed Salih, commented on BBC Newsnight that he was concerned the film “could provoke sectarian violence on the streets of Britain.”[4]

This is not the first time concerns have been expressed over the potential for intra-Muslim sectarianism in Britain. Although historically inter-communal relations between British Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have mostly been immune from sectarian tensions,[5] since at least the early 2000s – and most notably since the 2003 invasion of Iraq – sectarian conflicts elsewhere in the Muslim world have increasingly found expression on British soil.[6] With the fracturing of the 2011 Arab Spring protests along sectarian lines, coupled with the 2014 rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Muslim communities in Britain have been drawn into ongoing geopolitical and identarian debates that have served to reinforce sect-based divisions and stereotypes.[7] Though, as Elvire Corboz cautions in the Introduction to a forthcoming Special Issue on Sunni-Shi’a relations in Europe, “stereotypes do not however translate automatically into antagonistic action by the individuals holding them.”[8] Nevertheless, there is a growing community and academic consensus that intra-Muslim sectarianism does indeed pose a threat in contemporary Britain, and that the entrenchment of communal identity politics along sectarian lines will likely be exacerbated by the domestic context post-Brexit.

In many ways, the furore surrounding The Lady of Heaven offers a microcosm of Sunni-Shi’a relations in contemporary Britain; bitter disagreement and division, as well as the potential for solidarity and mutual understanding. In what follows, I trace a brief outline of some of the contributing factors leading to the sectarianisation of Muslim identity in Britain today, before offering a word of caution, and also – potentially – a ray of hope for the future.

Contextualising Sunni and Shi’a Islam in Britain: Points of convergence, points of difference

Muslims in Britain currently make up around five per cent of the UK population;[9] although there are no data regarding the different denominations within Islam, estimates suggest that Shi’a Muslims comprise between ten and 15 per cent of the overall Muslim population, while other minority denominations represent even smaller numbers.[10] As well as the doctrinal and theological differences between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in the UK (which are not the focus of this report, and about which I have written extensively elsewhere), there are demographic and cultural differences between the two communities, with Sunni Muslims predominately coming from South Asia (most notably Pakistan and Bangladesh), while Shi’a Muslims represent a more diverse community coming from countries including Afghanistan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, South Asia, and East African Indians (known as Khoja).[11] For this reason, there are multiple converging factors that contribute to different community identities for both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in Britain, and the potential for sectarian antagonism is not limited to religious disagreement but bound up with a wider array of factors including socioeconomic status, political differences, cultural solidarity, and differing migration histories.[12]

Despite such differences, however, both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in Britain share the experience of being part of a minority religious community within the larger British (Christian) majoritarian context in which Islam and Muslims are often cast as other and threatening. Since 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings, the British Government has engaged in a number of counter-terrorism initiatives and policies to combat the perceived threat of home-grown Islamist radicalism that have effectively branded Muslims in Britain as a “suspect community”.[13] These attempts to police the Muslim population through a securitised agenda, coupled with the ethnonormative logic of British multiculturalism, has arguably led to the emergence of a religiously-inflected Muslim political agency in Britain, whereby Muslims identify first and foremost through their religious affiliation.[14] Recent studies of Muslim political identity in the British context have highlighted the trend towards the racialisation of Islam as a primary marker of identity, in which the term “Muslim” has come to function “effectively as an ethno-religious category”.[15] This trend has arguably been exacerbated as a result of the Islamophobic political discourse surrounding Britain’s exit from the EU (‘Brexit’), with cases of hate crime against Muslims noted to have risen in the immediate period following the referendum vote in 2016.[16]

‘Good’ Muslim, ‘bad’ Muslim: Sectarianism and positive identity formation

Within this context, it is possible to see how historically differences within and between Muslim groups in Britain were less politically and socially salient than the shared experience of being part of a marginalised and “suspect” community in relation to wider British society. However, recent scholarship suggests that some Muslim groups have attempted to distance themselves from negative public perceptions of Islam by constructing an alternative Muslim identity within the British context. In particular, the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” dichotomy that has been so potent in contemporary British public and policy discourses constitutes an additional challenge, and has had particular implications for intra-Muslim relations.[17] The pressure on Muslims in Britain to “speak up” against violent extremism has led them to adopt and even reify the binary portrayal of Islam as good/bad, while also using it to categorise themselves and other co-religionists.[18] For example, some Shi’a groups have made use of this public discourse to make claims regarding the normative nature of Sunni (bad) and Shi’a (good) interpretations of Islam (such as claiming that “Shi’a Muslims are the biggest victims of terrorism” in reference to 2014 ISIS invasion of Iraq).[19] While there is evidence to suggest that attempts to construct a positive and emancipatory British Shi’a identity as qualitatively and normatively distinct from the Sunni mainstream are not ideologically sectarian, there nevertheless remains an extent to which these identity constructions harbour the potential to lead to unconscious forms of sectarian bias that could impact intra-Muslim relations.[20]

The recent controversy surrounding The Lady of Heaven perfectly illustrates how theological, political, and normative claims have become blurred in certain iterations of Shi’a identity in the British context. The film represents a very specific and ideologically-charged version of early Islamic history that pits Sunni and Shi’a interpretations against each other. While the film and its backers certainly do not represent the majority of Shi’a Muslim community in Britain, and indeed have been widely condemned by leading Shi’a clerics and community figures, the film’s discursive juxtapositioning of modern-day atrocities committed by ISIS and the suffering of Shi’a Muslims throughout history is a familiar trope in much contemporary Shi’a identity discourse, albeit in a much more extreme and politically-charged form.[21] Against the backdrop of ongoing sectarian (and especially anti-Shi’a) violence in the Middle East and wider Islamic world, Shi’a Muslims in Britain often feel sidelined or marginalised by the Sunni majority, and more needs to be done to bring these communities together to combat perceived grievances and to promote cross-denominational understanding in Britain.

Beyond sectarianism? Rethinking intra-Muslim solidarity and cohesion in contemporary Britain

Finally, I would argue that the recent protests against The Lady of Heaven, as well as revealing ideological and sectarian fault-lines within the British Muslim community, also represent the potential for greater intra-Muslim cohesion and understanding. The fact that Muslim organisations from both Sunni and Shi’a denominations issued statements unilaterally condemning the film, and that criticism of the film has not devolved into ideological disagreement, suggests that Muslims from both sects are willing to work together against a perceived common enemy (in this case, a radical interpretation of Islam that does a disservice to Sunni and Shi’a traditions alike). Indeed, there are numerous examples of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims working together in this way, and discourses promoting unity and cohesion between sects have a robust historical lineage in both traditions.[22] In contemporary Britain, it is more often than not the wider societal context that determines whether or not such unity discourses come to the fore, or are displaced in favour of sect-based identity building.

In a recent co-authored paper investigating grassroots initiatives by Shi’a-led organisations to promote an inclusive and cross-sectarian vision of British Islam, Elvire Corboz and I concluded that “it is impossible to understand Sunni-Shi‘a relations in Britain without taking into consideration the wider social and political context that informs relations between Muslim and non-Muslim society.”[23] As outlined above, the content and manifestation of sectarian identities in Britain is not merely a product of doctrinal and ideological differences between different confessional denominations, but a result of multiple converging factors including international geopolitics, transnational Islamic networks, and the securitisation and marginalisation of Islam in Britain. In this sense, predictions of sectarian tension between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in Britain that overlook the wider societal dynamics contributing to sect-based identity formation will fail to capture the complexities of inter, and intra-communal relations. On the other hand, ongoing public suspicion towards Islam and the entrenchment of Islamophobia in British society has the potential to calcify and incite sectarian differences, rather than placate them. Whether or not fears of sectarian violence on British soil come to fruition thus ultimately depends as much on British society itself as on the diverse Muslim communities who form a part of it.

Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti is a current Research and Outreach Associate at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, where she specialises in the nexus between minority Islam and European secularism. She holds a PhD and MSc from SOAS, University of London, and a BA from Oxford University. Dr Degli Esposti’s current research examines the public forms of activism undertaken by Shi’a Muslims in Europe, and seeks to illuminate the ongoing encounter between Islam and Europe, as well as the evolving dynamics within and between different Islamic sects. Her work has appeared in journals including Politics, Religion, State & Society, Religions, and Contemporary Islam, and she is currently working on a monograph entitled Not That Kind of Muslim: Sectarian Belongings and the Making of British Shi’ism (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press).

[1] BBC, Cineworld cancels The Lady of Heaven film screenings after protests, June 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61729392

[2] 5 Pillars, Lady of Heaven: pure, unadulterated sectarian filth, December 2021, https://5pillarsuk.com/2021/12/24/lady-of-heaven-pure-unadulterated-sectarian-filth/; Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission, Statement: Divisive film intends to fuel tensions between Muslims, June 2022, https://www.aimislam.com/statement-divisive-film-intends-to-fuel-tensions-between-muslims/

[3] Change.org, Remove the lady of Heaven from UK cinemas, https://www.change.org/p/remove-the-lady-of-heaven-from-uk-cinemas

[4] 5 Pillars, BBC Newsnight Debate: Roshan Salih vs Malik Shilbak on ‘Lady of Heaven’, June 2022, https://5pillarsuk.com/2022/06/09/bbc-newsnight-debate-roshan-salih-vs-malik-shilbak-on-lady-of-heaven/

[5] Clarkson, Anya. 2013. Addressing Sectarianism and Promoting Cohesion in the British Muslim Community: A Preliminary Report. London: Centre for Academic Shi‘a Studies.

[6] Caroline Wyatt, Fears over Deepening Sunni-Shia Divide in UK, BBC, March 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31691120

[7] Degli Esposti, Emanuelle and Scott-Baumann, Alison. Fighting for ‘Justice’, Engaging the Other: Shi’a Muslim Activism on the British University Campus. Religions 10, no. 3, (2019): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10030189; Ali, Zahra. Being a Young British Iraqi Shii in London: Exploring Diasporic Cultural and Religious Identities between Britain and Iraq. Contemporary Islam, (2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0433-y; Scharbrodt, Oliver, Gholami, Reza and Abid, Sufyan. Shi’i Muslims in Britain: Local and Transnational Dynamics. Contemporary Islam, (2017); Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. Fragmented Realities: The ‘Sectarianisation’ of Space among Iraqi Shias in London. Contemporary Islam 13, no. 3, (2019): 259–85, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0425-y; Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. 2019. Living Najaf in London: Diaspora, Identity, and the Sectarianisation of the Iraqi-Shi’a Subject, in Shi’a Minorities in the Contemporary World, (ed.) Oliver Scharbrodt and Yafa Shanneik. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press; Yousuf, Shereen. Right to Offense, Right to Shiaphobia: A Rhetorical Analysis of Yasir Qadhi’s Framings of Offense. Journal of Shia Islamic Studies 9, no. 1, (2016): 39–62.

[8] Corboz, Elvire. The Dynamics of Sunni-Shi’a Relations in Europe: Introduction, Journal of Muslims in Europe (forthcoming).

[9] Office for National Statistics, Muslim population in the UK, August 2018, https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/muslimpopulationintheuk

[10] Pew Research Centre, Estimated Percentage Range of Shia by Country, Mapping the Global Muslim Population, October 2009, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population/; For this reason, this report will focus on inter-communal relations between the two main branches of Islam, Sunnism and Shi’ism, while acknowledging that this doesn’t necessarily capture the full diversity of intra-Muslim relations in Britain.

[11] Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. The Aesthetics of Ritual – Contested Identities and Conflicting Performances in the Iraqi Shi’a Diaspora: Ritual, Performance and Identity Change. Politics 38, no. 1, (2018): 68–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717707092; Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. Sectarianising the Subject: Discourse, Identity, and the Self in the Transnational ‘Shi’a Rights’ Movement, n.d., 1–52; Degli Esposti and Scott-Baumann, Fighting for ‘Justice’, Engaging the Other: Shi’a Muslim Activism on the British University Campus; Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. Finding a ‘Shi’a Voice’ in Europe: Minority Representation and the Unsettling of Secular Humanitarianism in the Discourse of ‘Shi’a Rights’. Religion, State & Society, n.d.; Degli Esposti, Fragmented Realities: The ‘Sectarianisation’ of Space among Iraqi Shias in London; Degli Esposti, Living Najaf in London: Diaspora, Identity, and the Sectarianisation of the Iraqi-Shi’a Subject.

[12] Degli Esposti and Scott-Baumann, Fighting for ‘Justice’, Engaging the Other: Shi’a Muslim Activism on the British University Campus; Scharbrodt, Gholami, and Abid, Shi’i Muslims in Britain: Local and Transnational Dynamics.

[13] Awan, Imran, ‘I Am a Muslim Not an Extremist’: How the Prevent Strategy Has Constructed a ‘Suspect’ Community. Politics and Policy 40, no. 6, (2012): 1158–85, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00397.x/asset/polp397.pdf?v=1&t=j4jvoayg&s=b9178464215709579441902863a930e9ad009233&systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+unavailable+on+Saturday+01st+July+from+03.00-09.00+EDT+and+on+Sund; Yahya Birt, Safeguarding Muslim Children from Daesh and Prevent, The Muslim News, August 2015; Pantazis, Christina and Pemberton, Simon. From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community: Examining the Impacts of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation. The British Journal of Criminology 49, no. 5, (2009): 646–66; Scott-Baumann, Alison. Ideology, Utopia and Islam on Campus: How to Free Speech a Little from Its Own Terrors. Social Justice 12, no. 2, (2017): 159–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197917694183; Thomas, Paul. Failed and Friendless – the UK’s ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Programme. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 12, no. 3, (2010): 442–58, http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/8949/

[14] The term ‘ethnonormativity’, a reformulation of the notion of heteronormativity taken from the literature on gender studies and critical feminism (most notably the work of Judith Butler), is used here to refer to “a deeply embedded set of beliefs about essential sameness and difference that naturalise the notion of ‘ethnicity’ and provide it with the status of a proper (ontological) object” (Aly 2015: 199). Meer, Nasar. 2010. Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan; Modood, Tariq. Muslims and the Politics of Difference. Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities, (2009): 193–209; Morris, Carl. Muslim Identity Politics: Islam, Activism and Equality in Britain. Religion, State & Society 47, no. 3, (2019): 360–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2019.1574443; Al-Azmeh, Aziz and Fokas, Effie. 2007. Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511809309; Morris, Carl. The Rise of a Muslim Middle Class in Britain: Ethnicity, Music and the Performance of Muslimness. Ethnicities 20, no. 3, (2020): 628–48, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796818822541; Cesari, Jocelyne. Muslim Identities in Europe: The Snare of Exceptionalism. Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence, (2007): 49–67.

[15] Bloul, Rachel A. D. Anti-Discrimination Laws, Islamophobia, and Ethnicization of Muslim Identities in Europe and Australia. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 28, no. 1, (2008): 7.

[16] Awan, Imran and Zempi, Irene. ‘You All Look the Same’: Non-Muslim Men Who Suffer Islamophobic Hate Crime in the Post-Brexit Era. European Journal of Criminology 17, no. 5, (2020): 585–602; Miller, Carl et al.. From Brussels to Brexit: Islamophobia, Xenophobia, Racism and Reports of Hateful Incidents on Twitter. Demos, (2016); Bilgrami, Akeel. Reflections on Three Populisms, 44, no. 4, (2018): 453–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453718772896; Jon Burnett, Racial Violence and the Brexit State, Institute of Race Relations, 2016, https://irr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Racial-violence-and-the-Brexit-state-final.pdf

[17] Mamdani, Mafmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism. American Anthropologist 105, no. 2, (2003): 475–475, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.2.475.1

[18] Aslan Yildiz, Ali and Verkuyten, Maykel. Inclusive Victimhood: Social Identity and the Politicization of Collective Trauma Among Turkey’s Alevis in Western Europe. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 17, no. 3, (2011): 243–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/10781919.2011.587175; Corboz, Elvire. Shi‘i Discourses on Islamic Unity in the UK: Reconfiguring Majority-Minority Relations within Islam,Presentation at the panel ‘Intra- and Inter-Sect Dynamics and the Study of Sunni-Shi‘i Relations’. BRISMES Conference 2018, King’s College London, London UK. June 26 2018.

[19] Degli Esposti and Scott-Baumann, Fighting for ‘Justice’, Engaging the Other: Shi’a Muslim Activism on the British University Campus; Degli Esposti, Finding a ‘Shi’a Voice’ in Europe: Minority Representation and the Unsettling of Secular Humanitarianism in the Discourse of ‘Shi’a Rights.’

[20] Degli Esposti, Emanuelle. Forthcoming. ‘Not That Kind of Muslim’: Sectarian Belongings and the Making of British Shi’ism’. Chicago, US: Chicago University Press.

[21] Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission, Statement: Divisive film intends to fuel tensions between Muslims, June 2022, https://www.aimislam.com/statement-divisive-film-intends-to-fuel-tensions-between-muslims/

[22] Corboz, A Shi‘i Discourse on Islamic Unity in the United Kingdom: Reconfiguring Majority-Minority Relations within Islam.

[23] Degli Esposti, Emanuelle and Corboz, Elvire. ‘From the Margins to the Centre: Shi‘a-led grassroots organisations and inclusive Muslim identity in Britain.’ Journal of Muslims in Europe, (forthcoming).

Topics

Civil Society

Democracy and Elections

Regions

Europe

United Kingdom

Sectarianism in the Divided States of America

Article by Dr Richard Johnson

‘Sectarianism’ has traditionally referred to group conflict structured by religious differences, especially within the same faith. Study of the phenomenon has largely been confined to zones with violent conflict, especially the Middle East. In a strict sense, sectarianism is conflict between sects, coming from the Latin ‘secta’ or ‘following’, as in a religion. Yet, religious sects are hardly ever composed of intellectual or doctrinal divisions alone. They often map heavily (if not perfectly) onto ethnic, linguistic, class, and regional lines. Religious doctrine often is only peripheral to sectarian conflict.

Sensitivity to the breadth of identities involved in sectarian divides has led to a more inclusive understanding of the concept ‘sectarianism’. Simon Mabon and his collaborators have offered two conceptual innovations. The first is to widen the geographical scope of the study of sectarianism, which is heavily focused on violent religious conflict in the Middle East. Mabon writes, ‘there is nothing inherently “Middle Eastern” about [sectarianism]’, even if the region ‘undeniably’ is at the centre of many of these discussions.[1] The second is to widen sectarianism to apply to communal, identity-based divisions of all kinds, rather than ones simply focused on religious belief. Sectarian identities are not ‘primordial’ but ‘constructed’. They are ‘malleable entities that are often used for political ends’.[2] Crucially, sectarianism depends on the construction of ‘the other’ which entails ‘dehumanisation and scapegoating for political purposes’.[3]

These alterations to the framework of analysis allow for the inclusion of a case study, which is usually overlooked in the study of sectarianism, yet increasingly bears the hallmarks of a society that is riven by identity-based divisions mobilised for political ends: the United States of America. There is a sizeable (and growing) scholarship about the intense social and political divisions within the United States, yet such discussions are almost entirely separated from the conversation about sectarianism. Sectarianism is seen as something ‘other places’ do. This article disagrees. The United States is now clearly divided between sectae (‘followings’), not necessarily of the religious kind but of a similar fervour. Specifically, partisan identity – whether a person is a ‘Democrat’ or a ‘Republican’ – now shapes how Americans view the world, other Americans, and themselves. Americans have increasingly grown to hate supporters of the other party, viewing their capture of political power as not merely unfortunate but illegitimate.

Partisan identity in America

About 85 per cent of Americans identify as either Republican or Democrat, about the same proportion who say they believe in God.[4] Party identification is roughly evenly split, with a slight edge to Democratic identifiers. Aggregate party identity in the United States is remarkably stable. In spite of all the ructions of the Trump presidency, for example, there was almost no change in the proportion of Americans who identified as Democrat or Republican throughout his four years in office. Individual partisan identity has also been shown to be highly stable in the United States, even when formal party positions on issues might change substantially. Partisanship is not just an expression of voting intention or an historical catalogue of past voting behaviour. Studies in the US show that party identification is overwhelmingly a product of socialisation – family and friends – and tends to remain consistent through life.

Partisan identity shapes how Americans see the world around them. Voters interpret the same objective economic conditions differently depending on whether their party is in power. Voters ‘update’ or change their views on a whole range of issues, including objective facts, once it becomes clear to them what the view of their party is on an issue. This is sometimes called ‘motivated reasoning’, whereby people will tend to invent a rational basis or explanation for something, even if it is inconsistent with the truth, so that it conforms to their prior assumptions or identity.[5] Importantly, consistent with non-US literature on sectarianisation, partisan motivated reasoning can be made more salient and expansive when given stronger elite cues.[6] In other words, elites can exacerbate sectarian difference in the United States – and they regularly do.

Parties are a normal and inescapable feature of democratic politics. There is virtually no political system in the world which lacks parties. Even when parties are formally banned, proxies for parties, such as candidate-centred lists, soon crop up. As in the US today, parties in many other parts of the world are well-sorted along ideological lines. Voters have a clear choice, and it makes sense to structure the party system around coherent policy offers. In itself, partisanship is not something that should cause concern.

What makes the US different, however, is that voters do not simply disagree with people of the opposing party more than they once did; they hate them much more too.[7] Americans sort socially according to party, not just politically. Americans express a clear preference for living among people who vote like they do.[8] They express strong preference to living with, working with, dating, and socialising with people of the same party. Equally, they express stronger aversion to doing any of these things with a supporter of another party. Americans view opposing partisans as not just wrong but also morally degenerate. ‘Feeling thermometers’ are one way in which political scientists gauge the intensity of voters’ sentiments. The more positive a respondent feels to a person or group, the ‘warmer’ they will place themselves on a thermometer (scaled from 0 to 100). Since the 1970s, affection for co-partisans has hovered at about 75 degrees, but sentiments about supporters of the opposing party have dropped from about 50 degrees (neutral) to 25 degrees (cold).

Ideology (policy) can explain this phenomenon only partially. Studies have shown that even when voters are made aware of shared policy outlook with supporters of the opposing party, they still have strongly negative views of supporters of that party. On the other hand, strong partisans can be remarkably ideologically flexible. A study by Lilliana Mason found that Republicans were content to adopt left-of-centre positions, if they were first told that Donald Trump supported those positions.[9] Evidence suggests that partisans are more strongly motivated about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ than the substantive policy gains. People will accept less so long as it means the other group gets even less. This is not just a policy disagreement. It’s about sentiment, feeling, and tribalism.

What is driving this sectarianism?

Negative partisanship – hatred and social disgust towards the other party – is a form of sectarianism. Partisan identity is strong and remarkably stable, but it is, like other kinds of sectarian identity, ultimately constructed. Partisan identity is used to structure and interpret the world. Perhaps most importantly, partisan identity helps generate a clear sense of an ‘other’ group, which is viewed not just as an opponent in a normal political competition but as an enemy to be blocked from power.

Scholars have differed about why there has been a growth in affective polarisation and negative partisanship. Some have blamed the increasingly partisan media environment. Others have blamed social media echo chambers. These communications-focused accounts tend to portray the process as one of media corporations promoting extreme messages, which radicalise voters who then demand greater radicalism from their representatives. Social factors have also been said to be part of this. As people have moved to communities with like-minded people, echo chambers can form and generate suspicion of outsiders.

Other accounts focus on supply-side factors. Politicians have determined that negative partisanship is a powerful motivator and can boost turnout, even amongst an electorate that is cynical about politics. Voters might feel fairly unenthusiastic about all politicians, but even a jaded citizen might vote to stop a morally abhorrent candidate or party from being elected. Additionally, it is said that ordinary voters are increasingly forced to choose more extreme party nominees due to gerrymandering and the increased prevalence of primary elections. In these narrower contests, ideologically extreme candidates are selected by the party faithful and then stand in safe seats (‘the decline of the marginal district’). Voters are given two extreme visions of the parties and this only reinforces stereotypes and negative perceptions.

This article has proposed that comparative sectarianism is a relatively novel framework by which to understand the growing divide within US society. Scholars of sectarianism grapple with similar questions – identity, race, religion, ideology, belonging, etc. – and consider its implications for politics – inclusion, democracy, and minority rights. Yet, very little of the literature applies this concept to the US case, and it is overwhelmingly dominated by religious themes. While acknowledging the importance of this intellectual context, some of these approaches can be carried over into an analysis of the United States. It is hoped that by seeing negative partisanship as a case of sectarianism rather than simply policy disagreement can help explain other worrying developments in US politics, such as the willingness of political actors to breach established rules and norms to prevent the ‘other side’ from gaining power. In this light, the events of 6^th January 2021, to overthrow the US presidential election, become more explicable, if not any less concerning.

Dr Richard Johnson is Lecturer in US Politics & Policy at Queen Mary, University of London. He researches race, elections, and policymaking in the United States. He has published peer-review articles on voting rights, school segregation, racial coalitions, campaign finance, and social media. He is the author of The End of the Second Reconstruction: Obama, Trump, and the Crisis of Civil Rights (Polity, 2020) and US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol, 2021).

[1] Mabon, Simon. Sectarianism Beyond the Middle East. Religion, State, & Society 49, no. 2, (2021): 174-280.

[2] Mabon, Simon and Lucia Ardovini, Lucia. People Sects, and States: Interrogating Sectarianism in the Contemporary Middle East. Global Discourse 6, no. 4, (2016): 551-560.

[3] Ardonivi, Lucia. The Politicisation of Sectarianism in Egypt: Creating an Enemy. Global Discourse 6, no. 4, (2016): 579-600.

[4] Lydia Saad and Zach Hyrnowski, How Many Americans Believe in God?, Gallup, 2017, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268205/americans-believe-god.aspx

[5] Lodge, Milton and Charles Taber, Charles. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[6] Mabon, Simon. Desectarianization: Looking Beyond the Sectarianization of Middle Eastern Politics. Review of Faith and International Affairs 17, no. 4, (2019): 23-35. Bisgaard, Martin and Slothus, Rune. Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan Perceptual Gaps. American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 2 (2018), 456-469.

[7] Inyengar, Shanto, Sood, Gaurav & Lelkes, Yphtach. Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3, (2012): 405-431. Iyengar, Shanto and Krupenkin, Masha. The Strengthening of Partisan Affect. Advances in Political Psychology 39, no. 1, (2018): 201-218.

[8] Hui, Iris. Who Is Your Preferred Neighbor? Partisan Residential Preferences and Neighborhood Satisfaction. American Politics Research 41, no. 6, 2013: 997-1021. Gimpel, James and Hui, Iris. Political Fit as a Component of Neighborhood Preference and Satisfaction. City & Community 17, no. 3, (2018): 883-905.

[9] Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, US: University of Chicago Press. Barber, Michael and Pope, Jeremy. Does Party Trump Ideology?. American Political Science Review, (2019): 113:1.

Topics

Civil Society

Democracy and Elections

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Regions

United States and Canada

United States

Indian sectarianism: The cultural and the political

Article by Dr Ajay Gudavarthy

There has been considerable debate on Indian secularism but very little on Indian sectarianism. India has remained a ‘divided society’ but without sustained sectarian violence. However, in the last eight years of the current rightwing Modi government there has been sporadic and episodic violence between Hindus and Muslims, but also between caste groups, that looks organised. The question that should interest us in the current context is the equation between politically motivated and engineered violence and its sanction in everyday social beliefs and cultural practices. Is it entrenched social prejudices that produce consent for organised violence or is it politically organised violence that is constructing social consent based on how violence manages to re-signify the meaning of cultural codes?

The case of Indian sectarianism is oscillating between historically entrenched cultural practices and politically produced violence. While there are clear moments of convergence between the two, there is also observable dissonance between them. The dissonance takes shape when either the cultural practices resist violence or when violence distorts, or fails, to re-signify the cultural practices to its own imperatives.

Indian sectarianism is further fluctuating between establishing a low-intensity but a durable regime of sectarian conflicts between caste, cultural and religious communities and converting the existing sectarian conflicts into mass hysteria. Some scholars have already made a prognosis that Indian nationalism has entered a ‘genocidal phase’.[1] It also becomes pertinent to ask if the current regime has gained a cultural hegemony around sectarian strife between Hindus and Muslims, then from where does the need for using organised force and violence emerge? If violence is to establish control, then to ‘rule by exception’ seems to be a compulsion of the modern sovereign forms of governance that borders on the pathological. At such a point, sectarian conflicts look to be more political and less to do with social and cultural aspects. When do they flip from the cultural to the political? Do underlying cultural codes and narratives lend silent support or is exception about declaring autonomy from gaining legitimacy in everyday cultural codes such as memory, symbolism, myths and mythology.

Pew Research Centre, in a recent survey on tolerance in India, arrived at some intriguing findings that can potentially unlock some of the dilemmas that this essay begins with. The report argued that Indians in general (both Hindus and Muslims) valued diversity as a principle but preferred what it referred to as ‘living together, separately’.[2] The overwhelming majority of a large sample believed that religious and caste communities should live separately in segregated colonies. This, they believe, is essential to preserve their distinct culture and it is not about discrimination. Is this then a re-signified form in which cultural discrimination tends to reproduce itself in modern societies that are globalised and getting rapidly urbanised? Or could one argue that in light of faceless globalisation it is legitimate and even understandable as to why communities wish to preserve themselves as endogamous groups and pine for familiar surroundings? Could groups exist separately without it necessarily being sectarian and discriminatory?

Consider two instances that could throw some light on the underlying complexity. Well-known journalist, P. Sainath who covered rural India for well over three decades did a story that he aptly titled ‘The Glass War’. He pointed out that wayside highway dhabas (shanty restaurants) in the erstwhile undivided state of Andhra Pradesh followed the practice of offering tea in separate glasses for caste Hindus and other ‘lower’ castes.[3] After the local Dalit movement became socially and politically organised, it led protests against the ‘two glass’ policy of the dhabas. In response, the dhaba owners simply switched to disposable (paper/plastic) glasses that made discrimination invisible or rather unnamable. Sectarian practices were pushed into an intangible realm of intention, symbolism and gestures. It is a case of modern sectarian exclusion, which is easy to feel and experience, but difficult to spell and articulate. Much of modern forms of sectarianism in India are pushed into the dark alleys of silence that seem to erupt into violence of various kinds but whose causation is not easy to locate or identify.

The second instance is that of a recent advertisement in news dailies that invited applicants to buy apartments meant exclusively for the Brahmins in the Southern city of Bangalore.[4] While there was some protest against this it was defended as a way of creating familiar living conditions. In fact, food habits and vegetarianism were offered as legitimate reasons for the segregation that are not necessarily discriminatory against meat eaters. In ancient India, Brahmins lived in exclusive agraharas at the heart of the village where non-Brahmins were not allowed to enter. Vegetarianism has become the new template that is at the heart of potential sectarian conflicts in India. Vegetarianism is also being pushed through new scientific evidence on the health benefits, for example in combatting the COVID pandemic. The phenomenon of mob lynching against Dalits and Muslims has overtly to do with consuming beef and covertly with pushing a dominant narrative for vegetarianism. As part of the current Government’s Swatch Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission) public displays of meat are being prohibited in many places. In this case, sectarian conflicts are couched in deep-seated cultural practices, modern/rational justifications, and multiple significations of health, hygiene, and ecology.

The interaction between the politically organised sectarian violence and culturally embedded sectarian tensions are complexly overlaid. Organised political violence is seeking to ground itself in received and historically practiced cultural motifs. Sectarian violence is seeking cultural justification through creating popular narratives, while cultural discrimination is seeking modern and rational justifications. Further, it needs to be noted that Indian sectarianism of religious discrimination and strife is closely linked to other forms of communitarian practices of caste and gender in particular but also language and ethnicity. Religious violence cannot be understood in self-referential terms. Additionally, it is insufficient to make sense of religion, caste and gender vis-s-vis each other. It is equally important to note what is happening internally to each of these identities. For instance, the category of Dalit is undergoing a change and is becoming sub-divided. It is barely a stable category that is able to hold the various sub-groups within. The mutual and common identification created around the practice of untouchability is giving way to internal diversification. This is creating both mobility and strife. It is creating socio-psychological dynamics that are being tied up in the context of religious sectarianism and also in efforts to create a monolithic order. The fear of losing existing social privileges, even if one is located way below in the pecking order seem to be the over-arching anxiety that is referred to in the author’s previous writings on ‘secular sectarianism’.[5]

The ethic of ‘fear of fall’ has been the generic sentiment of neoliberal reforms that spread across the social domain in India replacing the normative imagination in the popular politics of shared ethos. The story of Indian sectarianism is incomplete without understanding how cultural practices and political strategies of polarisation found resonance in the economic model of development. The ‘Nehruvian consensus’ for accommodation and shared ethos found in the discourses of secularism, centrism and socialism were replaced by individual responsibility and ‘Social Darwinism’ and ‘Animal Spirits’ of the market ideals of inclusive social development with exclusive growth-centric narratives. Social democratic parties, such as the Congress, that introduced the neoliberal economic reforms in the 1990s however continued with the ideals of secularism in the social domain. This strategy to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds was rejected and lost the popular mandate.

What replaced it was a ‘predatory state’ that fine-tuned social ethics to market dynamics. It transformed dormant social prejudices and everyday religious practices of the dominant community into militant self-assertion. It constructed the narratives of ‘historical injury’ and ‘appeasement’ of religious minorities. It transformed the spiritual and otherworldly pursuits of religion into an instrumentalised identity. Discourses of individual self-realisation intrinsic to religion and faith got hooked to the ‘possessive individualism’ of the market. Postcolonial arguments of an Eastern ‘way of life’ where ideals of the sacred as against the profane being central to community, ideals of ‘moral economy’ as against bare interests did not seem to resist their appropriation into an aggressive sectarian logic of the right. In fact, the rhetoric of ‘nationalism’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘civilisation’ were deployed to counter the critique of growing ‘sectarianisation’. In a recent document on ‘India as a democracy’, prepared by the Policy Planning and Research Division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) after the downgrade of Indian democracy by the global watchdog institutions, it reasserted the ‘Indian way’ on democracy.[6] The document invokes the idea of distinct ‘civilisational ethos’, and argues India is a deeply pluralistic society intuitively an international society. It claimed that the term ‘Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam’ – the world as a family – is deeply entrenched in Indian thinking. Describing Indian democracy as a ‘human institution’, the MEA attempts to place its practice in the ‘civilisational context’ tracing it to ‘panchayats in Ramayana’ and ‘Shanti Parva in Mahabharata’.[7]

Indian sectarianism in its current form is riding on a high dose of symbolism, moral rhetoric and a deep cultural ‘sub-conscious’. Discourses of secularism and constitutionalism have either been appropriated or rendered ineffective. While those struggling to mobilise against the current aggressive sectarianism are not finding a foothold in everyday ethics and emotions, those mobilising sectarianism are struggling to manufacture hysteria. Whether older ideals of secularism and centrism are having an afterlife in this new uneasy equilibrium is something to wait and watch for.

Ajay Gudavarthy is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His forthcoming book is titled Politics, Ethics and Emotions in `New India` (Routledge, London, 2022).

[1] Arjun Appadurai, Modi’s India Has Now Entered Genocidalism, the Most Advanced State of Nationalism, The Wire, January 2022, https://thewire.in/politics/narendra-modi-india-genocidalism

[2] Neha Sahgal, Jonathan Evans, Ariana Monique Salazar, Kelsey Jo Starr and Maolo Corichi, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, Pew Research Center, June 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/; Ajay Gudavarthy, Understanding the Role of Religion in Indian Public Life, The Leaflet, July 2021, https://theleaflet.in/understanding-the-role-of-religion-in-indian-public-life/

[3] Shyama Venkateswar, Dalits in India 2000, Asia Society, https://asiasociety.org/dalits-india-2000?fbclid=IwAR25tsYLivkwMwuTPVzGJ1Y_wNIheRNdYbDxMa8l-njT-JDlKyijWNpxtzY; Also, refer, Palagummi Sainath, The borderline of caste, The Hindu, April 1999, and Palagummi Sainath, The Hindu, November 1998.

[4] Shankara Agraharam, The Vedic Village, https://www.vedicagraharam.com/township/plots/?fbclid=IwAR0PW6yZVnlBu8KOL9srAR7zrT9aDfhThyHKHe2x2_3lZCQBFYQS-RAQCow; N. Bhanutej, Housing apartheid in Indian city, Al Jazeera, February 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/2/28/housing-apartheid-in-indian-city?fbclid=IwAR0fD6tFgDTj9ns3rd_cw7H-OD3pAFt-IEPVtUnhxLZoT8KbMuLWFyUvn2g

[5] Professor Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, Subaltern and its Fragments: Aporias of Identity of Politics, Review of Dr Ajay Gudavarthy’s book Secular Sectarianism, Live Encounters, March 2020, https://liveencounters.net/2020-le-mag/03-march-2020/professor-anindya-sekhar-purakayastha-subaltern-and-its-fragments-aporias-of-identity-politicsreview-of-dr-ajay-gudavarthys-book-secular-sectarianism/

[6] Ministry of External Affairs, India: A Dynamic Democracy http://www.mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/184_india-dynamic-democracy.pdf

[7] Anisha Dutta, New India leaders less from English-speaking world, so judged harshly: MEA paper, The Indian Express, February 2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/express-exclusive/new-india-leaders-less-from-english-speaking-world-so-judged-harshly-mea-paper-7784564/

Topics

Civil Society

Democracy and Elections

Good Governance and Institutional Reform

Human Rights

Regions

Asia

India

South Asia

Sanctions against Russia: Why and how they work, or should work

Join our mailing list

War as a sign of weakness: Failure of reforms and of reframing the Russian nation

Join our mailing list

Dividing Lines – Executive Summary

Join our mailing list

Dividing Lines – Introduction: Sectarianism as a boundary making process

Join our mailing list

Can national unity cure sectarian division? The potential pitfalls of nationalist protest discourses

Join our mailing list

Northern Ireland: Still a deeply divided society?

Join our mailing list

Demanding radical hope for peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Join our mailing list

Divided we stand: Intra-Muslim sectarianism and solidarity in post-Brexit Britain

Join our mailing list

Sectarianism in the Divided States of America

Join our mailing list

Indian sectarianism: The cultural and the political

Join our mailing list

Join our mailing list