Description
In any protracted conflict, both sides attempt to disseminate narratives of the war, its origins and likely resolution that accord with their own foreign policy priorities, employing all means and social capital at their disposal in order to do so. Under-researched in this wider context is the role played by religious organisations to propagate or resist wartime (dis)information and historical revisionism. Building on diverse literatures from different global contexts, this paper examines the types of informational roles taken on by religious organisations in a variety of neo-authoritarian regimes worldwide. It goes on to conceptualise the role of religious institutions as information actors in their own right, and presents a case study of the ways in which religious actors have engaged with matters of historic, political and cultural contestation during Russia’s war on Ukraine. The case demonstrates that despite the often lengthy intertwinement of religion and geopolitics, religious organisations’ information activities are not merely secondary to their associated state. Rather, there is evidence of a wide range of moral, institutional and religious logics that impact on religious organisations’ function as information actors, which speak to their significant role in the propagation and resistance of (dis)information in wartime.
