In 42 religious civilwars from 1940 to 2000,1incumbent governments and rebels who identifiedwith Islam were involved in 34 (81 percent), far more than those identifyingwith other religions, such as Christianity (21, or 50 percent) or Hinduism (7, or16 percent).2In addition, civil wars in which key actors identify as Islamic aremore likely to escalate into religious civil wars than civil wars in which keyactors identify with other religions.In this article I argue that overlapping historical, geographical, and, in par-ticular, structural factors account for Islam’s higher representation in religiouscivil wars. Together, the historical absence of an internecine religious war simi-lar to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618–48), the geographic proximity ofIslam’s holiest sites to Israel and large petroleum reserves, and jihad—a struc-tural feature of Islam—explain why so many civil wars include Islamic partici-pants. When political elites come under immediate threat, they will work toreframe issues of contention as religious issues, essentially attempting to out-International Security, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Spring 2007), pp. 97–131© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.97Getting Religion?Getting Religion?Monica Duffy ToftThe Puzzling Case of Islamand Civil WarMonica Duffy Toft is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government atHarvard University.For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, the author would like to thank IvanArreguín-Toft, Marie Besançon, Francis Deng, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Shah, and Jack Snyder, aswell as the participants of the John M. Olin Institute National Security Seminar at Harvard Univer-sity and two anonymous reviewers. For research assistance, the author thanks Assaf Moghadamand Todd Sescher. This article is part of a larger research project, Religion and Global Politics, thatreceived generous funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Weatherhead Centerfor International Affairs at Harvard University.1. I deªne a “religious civil war” as a war in which religious belief or practice is either a central orperipheral issue in the conºict. For religion to count as “central,” combatants had to be ªghtingover whether the state or a region of the state would be ruled according to a speciªc religious tra-dition—as in the cases of Afghanistan, Chad, and Sudan. For religion to count as “peripheral,”combatants had to identify with a speciªc religious tradition and group themselves accordingly,but the rule of a speciªc religious tradition could not be the object of contention. An examplewould be the conºict in the former Yugoslavia, which involved Bosnian Muslims (Islam), Croats(Catholicism), and Serbs (Orthodox Christianity). This leaves open the question of conºation ofethnicity and religion: if ethnicity and religion generally covaried, then Orthodox Christianity mayhave been a central issue in the Serb campaign to hold Yugoslavia together under Serb rule. Butethnicity and religion did not covary. Although most ethnic Serbs, for example, are OrthodoxChristian, not all are. Moreover, local leaders made nationalist rather than religious bids, whichunderscores the low proªle of religion compared to other issues of contention.2. See Monica Duffy Toft, “Religion, Civil War, and International Order,” Discussion Paper, No.2006-03 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. KennedySchool of Government, Harvard University, July 2006), p. 12.bid each other in an effort to establish religious credibility and thus attract do-mestic and external support.A recent empirical survey of civil wars from 1940 to 2000 revealed twoªndings. First, the percentage of civil wars in which religion has become a cen-tral issue has increased over time. Second, these religious civil wars are muchmore destructive than wars fought over other issues: they result in more casu-alties and more noncombatant deaths, and they last longer.3I begin by introducing the subject of religion in civil wars and then offer adeªnition of religion. Next I put forth a theory of religious outbidding to helpexplain why religion becomes a central issue in some civil wars but not in oth-ers. I then offer three hypotheses on the role of religion in civil wars and exam-ine the problem of Islam’s disproportionate representation in religious civilwars from 1940 to 2000.4After testing these hypotheses against a statisticaldata set of civil wars, I examine the case of Sudan’s two civil wars. I concludewith a discussion of some of the theoretical and foreign policy implications ofreligion and civil war that follow from this analysis.Religion in Civil WarsIn recent years, organized religion has experienced a worldwide resurgence,5and with it an increase in religiously inspired violence and war. Examples in-clude al-Qaida’s attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, as wellas civil wars raging between Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, betweenHindus and Muslims in India, and among Muslims in Iraq. Partly as a result,policymakers have focused greater attention on the subject of religion and or-ganized violence.6Yet more than ªve years after al-Qaida’s attack on NewInternational Security 31:4 983. Ibid., pp. 17–18.4. I selected this time period for three reasons. First, it permits comparison of the maximum data(civil wars) possible. Second, it does so in the time period closest to our own. Third, it allows infer-ences to be drawn without as much risk of perturbation from World War I and World War II (onlyone war carried over from 1940). In sum, conclusions drawn from this data set have the highestpotential to yield both general and statistically signiªcant ªndings.5. Ibid.; and Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, “Why God Is Winning,” Foreign Policy,No. 155 (July/August 2006), pp. 39–43.6. See Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds., Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); the special issue of Millennium: Journal of InternationalStudies, Vol. 29, No. 3 (December 2000); and Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How IdeasShaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). For recentworks that assess the resurgence of religion in public life, see Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: TheResurgence of Islam,