
Seek and You Shall Find Religious Intelligence in British Counter-Insurgency Operations
Counter-insurgency forces across a variety of contexts have been criticised in recent years for insufficient attention to the role of religion in insurgency wars. The consensus view of this critique alleges that military planners, at best, misunderstand the impact of religious identities
and beliefs on guerrilla forces and, at worst, ignore them all together. In this article, I challenge this conventional wisdom by tracing the routine efforts of British forces to understand the impact of religion during conflicts in Mandatory Palestine, Cyprus, and Kenya. Drawing on original
data collected from the colonial archives, I demonstrate how security personnel repeatedly obtained and evaluated religious intelligence in three key issue areas: combat operations, information operations, and demobilisation. My findings have significant implications for the study of both
religious violence and civil wars. First, they illustrate how binaries that construe state actors as secular and non-state actors as religious are often oversimplified. Second, they point to how religion affects conflict in meaningful, and oftentimes unanticipated, ways. While not necessarily
the cause of a particular rebellion, religious sensibilities often shape how counterinsurgents combat guerrilla forces.
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: May 1, 2016
- St. Antony's International Review (STAIR) is a peer-reviewed journal of International Affairs based at St. Antony's College, Oxford. Founded by graduate students of the College in 2005 and led by students to this day, STAIR provides a platform for veteran and emerging scholars alike to publish about a variety of critical global issues. STAIR is thankful for the support of St. Antony's College and the Oxford Department of Politics and International Affairs (DPIR) for their generous and multifaceted support.
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