Beyond Faith and Fury: Rethinking Religious Violence in the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-90

This open access book presents a critical and holistic view of religious violence by examining diverse militias within the Lebanese civil war , comparing religious (including Christian and Islamic) and secular (including left-wing and right-wing) militia movements and their militants. The book describes when, where, and how the religious and the secular were re-articulated in ever more extreme ways by militias and militants. Alongside archival perspectives on militia propaganda and leadership positions - based on the insights from militia magazines, communiques, and weeklies - the book presents interview data from 63 militants who reflect on their mobilization to violence. This study adds a fresh perspective to the study of religious violence by contextualizing organisations, infrastructures, manipulations, and expressions of religion within wider psychological, socio-economic, and political settings, and by connecting and comparing them to their non-religious equivalents. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.