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War and propaganda have been linked together for a long time because of a natural human inhibition against killing other humans. To get citizens to give their consent to go to war and kill, the leader(s) need to influence them. The aim of this study is to analyse the content and functions of the U.S. governments post 9/11 propaganda to find out how this where done. Coyne and Hall argue that propagandists need the publics enlighted consent to be able to influence them. This work will prove that the U.S. government used propagandistic tools, like the fear of our own and our civilizations annihilation through an apocalyptic language, to circumvent our rational thinking and talk unbridled to our emotions and thereby inhibit our higher cognitive functions. As method we use bricolage. Bricolage interpretations adapt different technical discourses to each other and move freely between different techniques and concepts. In this work it had an advancement over other methods because our field of investigation stretched over different fields of research and we were free to use the method that best suited our collected data. We demonstrate that the U.S. government functioned as fearmongers on their home audience to stir up emotions so the citizens would choose the path that best suited the leader(s), but that it was far from being enlighted.

This research aims to examine character education in pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools also known as pondok pesantren) as a model of religious education in transforming the attitudes of students in line with the values and culture of a diverse society. This study is based on documents related to the curriculum and student guidance system, which were confirmed through interviews with leaders and teachers, as well as observations at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, Indonesia. The research findings indicate that Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, Indonesia, has implemented a transformative education system. Students have undergone a transformation from traditional, fanatic, and closed values to modern, rational, disciplined, inclusive, independent, and responsible ones. The transformation in students' personalities occurs not only through classroom learning but also through reflective engagement in pesantren management, discussions, and public speaking exercises. The findings of this study imply that the religious education system in pesantrens should prioritize not only the cognitive aspects of doctrinal religious knowledge, but also involve students in society, fostering open, tolerant, and rational characters.

This is a psychobiographical study of a Muslim advocate of nonviolence: Wahiduddin Khan. The study is based on seven semi-structured interviews, several of Khan’s speeches, and a number of his books. The material was subjected to narrative analysis, informed by McAdams’ and Polkinghorne’s methodological guidelines. The theoretical framework of the analysis is life story theory of identity. The purpose of the study is to examine the relation between Khan’s identity, ideology and culture. The results of the study showed that his identity and ideology evolved over time, and that they are deeply embedded in Indian culture and society.

Vad är fundamentalism och terrorism och hur förhåller de sig till varandra? Varför ansluter sig vissa till militanta grupper och vad kännetecknar radikalisering? Vilka inre och yttre faktorer ligger bakom religiöst motiverade våldshandlingar? Fundamentalism och terrorism är globala fenomen som berör alla religioner på ett eller annat sätt. I boken behandlas dessa företeelser ur ett religionspsykologiskt perspektiv. Forskning har visat att det finns ett antal sociala och psykologiska faktorer som kan få helt vanliga människor att begå fruktansvärda handlingar. Med hjälp av konkreta exempel visar författaren att religiösa och sekulära våldshandlingar styrs av samma mekanismer och kan förklaras på likartade sätt. Denna andra upplaga av Fundamentalism och helig terror är reviderad, utökad och uppdaterad.

In this article, I discuss Hjalmar Sundén’s theoretical and methodological contributions to the psychological study of religion in the Nordic countries, including a discussion of role theory and Sundén’s way of conducting (and presenting) his research. Nordic scholars’ use of role theory is analyzed and discussed. My analysis of the state of research reveals that the use of role theory reached its peak during the 1970s. Scholarly interest in the theory declined during the 1980s, and has been virtually abandoned since the mid-1990s. In these earlier studies, the theory was primarily used to elucidate the psychological dynamic of various religious phenomena, rather than to test the theory systematically against data. However, these scholars gave the theory an empirical underpinning, and identified details in the theory that needed to be refined and revised. I propose several possible reasons for the decline in scholarly interest in role theory. Finally, I suggest that Sundén’s methodological contributions may have had a bigger impact on the study of religion than his theoretical contributions.

The literature on religious conflicts has primarily focused on the underlying factors that make some places more predisposed to religious violence than others, such as psychological, structural, political, socio-economical and cultural factors. Socioeconomic deprivation and psychological alienation have been singled out as particularly important factors. However, previous research pays insufficient attention to the proximate causes of religious conflicts and the role played by various actors in transforming potential violent situations into deadly conflicts. 

It is not sufficient to demonstrate that individuals or groups engaged in armed conflicts are religious (or fundamentalists), aggrieved or alienated, because most religious people (and fundamentalists) are never engaged in armed conflicts, and grievances and psychological alienations are almost universal. Deprived religious people must believe that armed struggle is the only option for them. To be able to engage in armed conflicts, individuals will have to create conflict solidarity and a conflict ideology that supports conflict behavior, mobilize conflict resources, recruit committed activists, and establish viable conflict organizations (or reorganize existing organizations) that enable them to fight against the opponent.

A serious conflict between Christians and Moslems erupted on the 19th of January 1999 in the Moluccas, Indonesia. The conflict, which lasted for three years, claimed at least 5000 victims and resulted in approximately 750 000 refugees. This paper presents an analysis of how Christians and Moslems were mobilized to participate in the conflict. The analysis, primarily based on interviews with former participants in the conflict, focuses on the creation of conflict solidarity, mobilization of conflict resources, recruitment of committed activists, and the creation of conflict organizations. 

In recent years, nonviolent action has gained global attention owing to the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the U.S., the MST Movement in Brazil, the Zapatista Movement in Mexico, and the BDS Movement in Israel/Palestine. Several studies demonstrate that movements that maintain nonviolent discipline have higher rates of success than movements that turn to armed struggle. The ability to maintain nonviolent discipline is crucial to achieving success because violent methods tend to undermine popular support of contentious movements and provide a pretext for states to use violence to prevent harm andestablish law and order. Recent research has also shown that nonviolent movements are much more likely to succeed when state elites and/or security forces defect. It is well known that religious actors have played important roles in several nonviolent campaigns, such as the Indian Independence Movement, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the People Power Movement in the Philippines, and the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, but the impact of religion on nonviolent discipline and defection has not been adequately addressed in previous research. In this paper, I examine nonviolent discipline and defection in terms of obedience and disobedience. Drawing on contemporary nonviolence research and psychological studies of obedience/disobedience, I argue that religion can, and sometimes does, facilitate obedience to nonviolent principles and disobedience to state authorities.

Explanations of violent religious conflicts usually focus on preconditions, facilitator causes or precipitating events at micro, meso or macro levels of analysis. As social psychology is the scientific study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behaviors are influenced by interactions and transactions between groups and individuals, it can increase our understanding of the dynamics of religious conflicts at micro and meso levels. In this paper, I illustrate this point with a discussion of the utility of social movement theory for understanding the dynamics of religious conflicts. Social movement theory locates religious conflicts within broader contexts and complex processes by focusing on the interplay between micro and meso factors and the ways in which people perceive macro factors. Given certain conditions, religion can and often do contribute to collective violence. Religion is rarely, if ever, the main cause of intergroup conflicts, but is often used as an instrument for the mobilization of human and non-human resources. Appeal to religion may help conflicting parties overcome the collective action problem associated with intergroup conflicts. This does not necessarily mean that religious conflicts have unique characteristics or a logic of their own that sets them apart from other types of intergroup conflicts.

Radicalization can be described as a change in beliefs, feelings and behaviors in directions that increasingly legitimize collective violence. The final stage is typically the actual undertaking of violent acts in support of a political cause. Why do some people move toward violence and how do they move in this direction? In this paper, I describe mechanisms of radicalization relevant to understanding the origins of religious violence. Based on theory and empirical data, I argue that some people are exposed to a combination of factors – political, socioeconomic, ideological, and/or social – that cause them to be more vulnerable to radicalization than others. The process by which people come to join a militant religious group and internalize its collective action frame is conceptualized as a process of mobilization. I make a distinction between two types of mobilization: informal and elite-directed mobilization. Informal mobilization occurs through loosely connected networks based mainly on personal friendship as well as shared school, workplace, or neighborhood. In elite-directed mobilization, religious leaders exploit grievances by creating and directing – inclusive or exclusive – groups through which mobilization takes place. In the case of Indonesia, I show how national and transnational networks facilitate radicalization in various ways, for example, by creating a shared sense of identity.

The aim of this article is to discuss the use and usefulness of psychological theory and psychological methods in the study of religious violence. My analysis of previous research revealed an imbalance between data, method and theory. There are few psychological studies on religious terrorism based on first-hand empirical data. The analysis also showed that psychological explanations of religious terrorism are, in general, not sensitive to cultural factors. Religious terrorism is a culturally constituted phenomenon. It is therefore important that research on religious violence is based on theoretical and empirical approaches sensitive to the cultural construction of violence. This means that psychologists of religion must be willing to use novel and creative methods sensitive to the unique cultural context where the violent behaviour is acted out and interpreted by the actors of the violent drama, for example, discourse analysis or narrative research. In the self-corrective and growth-inducing feedback process between these methods and primary data it would be possible to develop valid psychological explanations of religious violence.

A small but growing scholarly literature examines the role of religion in violent intergroup conflicts. In this literature, the term religious conflict is employed as a short-hand descriptor for what is posited as a distinct category of collective violence. This type of conflict is shown to be more lethal, indiscriminate, and intractable than its secular counterpart. In this talk, I argue that the distinction between religious and non-religious conflicts is highly problematic and somewhat misleading in its assumptions. I argue that most literature on violent religious conflicts fails to provide convincing criteria for separating religious conflicts from non-religious conflicts. What characteristics or factors make a conflict party, conflict issue, or identity, religious, and what characteristics or factors make a conflict party, conflict issue or identity, non-religious? Moreover, I find the argument that religious identities and beliefs cause conflict behavior as too simplistic from the perspective of modern psychology. The problem is the assumption that human behavior is exclusively, or primarily, caused by conscious beliefs and moral principles, the reliance on retrospective self-reports and post hoc rationalizations, and that the role of religious beliefs and motives in intergroup conflicts is typically assumed rather than analyzed, contextualized, and problematized.

A growing number of scholars argues that we are witnessing a resurgenceof religion in world politics, accompanied by an increasein religiously inspired conflict. Empirical studies demonstrate thatreligious conflicts are more violent, more intense, more durable, andmore difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements than theirsecular counterparts. In this paper, we argue that these conclusionsare unreliable, because they fail to provide convincing criteria forseparating religious conflicts from non-religious ones. Our mainconcern is with the categorization problem. What characteristics orfactors make a conflict party, conflict issue, or identity religious, andwhat characteristics or factors frame a conflict party, conflict issue,or identity as non-religious? A basic assumption behind much of thisresearch is the contested idea that religion is a universal phenomenonembodied in various forms such as Islam and Christianity. The majorityof scholars simply assume a sharp division between religion andthe secular without problematizing or justifying such a distinction. Inthis article, we argue that religious conflict is an ideologically chargedconcept, and that the study of the religion-conflict nexus reinforcesthe neoliberal status quo and current systems of power.

In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. Most scholars who concern themselves with spirituality assume that it is a universal phenomenon that is essentially the same everywhere. But the isolation of spirituality as a sphere of life that is separated from other spheres is not a universal feature of human history. Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that spirituality is associated with political activism and the struggle for social and economic justice, illustrates this point. Spirituality is a modern concept with a specific history and what counts as spirituality and what does not depend on different configurations of power. In this paper, we explore why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as spirituality has maintained such a currency in the literature of the psychology of religion. We argue that the category of spirituality is a sociopolitical management technique for reinforcing political quietism, which is necessary for the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo.

Categorization is an innate human ability that helps us understand and perceive the world around us. In this article, we explore how this ability affects how and why people, groups, and states around the world categorize Muslims. Our focus is primarily on the categories of moderate and radical, and the problems associated with these two distinctions. We argue that what counts as radical as opposed to moderate is always changing, because it depends on what is considered moderate at a particular time and place and is therefore also dependent on existing power arrangements. We also argue that the categorization of radical and moderate is linked to liberal values and liberal politics, rather than to theological beliefs.

In the wake of numerous terror attacks around the globe, academic and popular discourse on radicalization has witnessed exponential growth in publications that, sadly, have not resulted in a coherent or consensus definition of the concept, nor have they determined its causality and effects. In this article, we use the term three-pronged process of radicalization by narrative to denote an ongoing process of meaning-making, adaptation, and coping, and argue this process to be inherently linked with the social, cultural, and ideological construction and reconstruction of the identity arch-story of individual lives. We suggest that, in some cases, the ceaseless process of social interaction of identity narratives eventuates in what we define as the Shapeshifting Self, by coherently fusing stories of personal loss, rupture, or trauma together with the counterparts of movements and national stories of sociopolitical engagement. At the endpoint of the process, violent engagement is perceived by the self as legitimate and even necessary for the psychological well-being of the perpetrator. By applying this approach to the Jewish-Israeli context, we aim to illustrate the socioculturally situated contingencies associated with the process of radicalization by narrative.