Beneath the Surface of Religious and Cultural Conflicts

Paula Green

Although most conflicts involving culture and religions currently are fought within state boundaries, the roots of these conflicts extend beyond the nation-state to include the interests of external stakeholders. Interlocked sources of armed conflict, such as unjust economic and political arrangements, massive arms trade, poverty, inequitable distribution of land, water and other natural resources, failed post-colonial governments, centuries of exploitation, historical grievances, and misuse of power, may be framed or misconstrued as conflicts of identity, religion and culture.

Identity or religious and cultural differences seldom, if ever, cause armed conflict, but are frequently exploited to foment conflict. Popular leaders may evoke sacred images or historical memories to incite violence, manipulating populations for private gain or glory and creating the illusion that religious or cultural differences are provoking war. Competition for scarce resources and, at a deeper level, greed, anger, fear and misguided notions of separateness, more likely underlie the causes of war.

Religious or cultural fundamentalism may stimulate conflict, but fundamentalism often masks a deeper fear of annihilation, a sense troubling many cultural and religious groups today that global homogeneity, aggressive commercialism, and diminishing resources will displace their centuries-old practices and patterns of culture.

Religion, culture, ethnicity, and identity per se do not cause rampant inter-communal violence, but function rather as banners to which communities rally in the search for protection from complex and menacing forces of change. Applying the label of identity-based conflict masks the complex macro forces and deep existential fears confronting the human family. Thus we understand the phrase religious and cultural conflicts to stand for an aggregation of subterranean issues that fuel contemporary violence.
Excerpted from an article by
Paula Green, "CONTACT: Training A New Generation of Peacebuilders"
published in Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, Consciousness and Transformation, January 2002