Acts of interpersonal violence have often been attributed to strong and uncompromising belief systems, religious fanaticism, or ideological rigidity. The mass media and more recently the social media often interpret acts of deliberate injuring or killing of another human being, previously unknown to the assailant, through the prism of specific beliefs, doctrinal creeds, and durable cultural identities. For example, from the nineteenth century to contemporary times a variety of secular and religious ideologies have been blamed for various acts of violence – anarchism, socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, anarcho-primitivism, ethnic nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, racism, Christian fundamentalism, neo-Luddism, Hindu fundamentalism, radical environmentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, Maoism, Trotskyism, white nationalism, and so on. The focus has regularly been on imputing causal links between a person’s values and their acts of violence. Similarly, many wars, revolutions, genocides, and insurgencies have also been described as conflicts that were generated and sustained by incompatible belief systems. Thus, one often hears that competing nationalisms produced war, that different religions have caused a communal conflict and sectarian violence, that anti-monarchism and republicanism were behind specific revolutions, or that racism leads to genocide. In this chapter I explore the role religious and secular ideologies play in the individual and collective motivations for violence. The chapter critically addresses existing scholarship on the role of ideas, norms, and values in violent behaviour and articulates an alternative view of ideological power. I argue that the ongoing process of ideologisation rather than the fixed ideological doctrines shape the historical dynamics of violence. In this context ideological penetration helps justify violent acts and also mobilises a wider support base for violent action. Nevertheless, since human beings are complex and reflective creatures, ideological power alone is not enough to initiate and maintain social fighting. Instead, social pugnacity is regularly premised on the effective interaction of coercive bureaucratisation, ideologisation, and their envelopment in networks of micro-solidarity. The first part of the chapter offers a critical analysis of the existing approaches that emphasise the centrality of ideology for violence while the second part articulates an alternative interpretation of ideological power. The key theoretical points are illustrated with selected empirical case studies.
