Description
While existing research demonstrates that religiously framed conflicts, particularly those involving Islamist armed groups, exhibit greater intractability and recurrence rates, the underlying causes remain debated. Current explanations emphasize the transnational nature of Islamist militant groups, their organizational advantages, and compatibility with asymmetric warfare. However, this study argues that previous analyses may conflate regional and religious factors, as many Islamist civil wars concentrate in specific regions, such as the MENA region. We propose a systematic examination to disentangle whether the observed intractability stems from an Islamist ‘exception’ or regional and war-related patterns. Our analysis focuses on three key dimensions of war dynamics: country-specific conflict legacies, inter-group relations within conflicts, and the international politics of civil wars. We demonstrate the power of these structural and contextual factors for explaining civil war intractability through a cross-national analysis and case studies of the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars. This research contributes to the broader understanding of civil war intractability by challenging predominant assumptions about the role of religious ideology in conflict persistence.
