Politicized Religion, Armed Conflict, and Planetary Health: A Seven-Dimensional Framework for Analysis and Peacebuilding

Abstract

Armed conflict is a planetary health concern because it disrupts interconnected human, institutional, cultural, and ecological systems on which health and collective well-being depend. Religion is rarely the sole cause of such conflict, but it may become a consequential and changing dimension when political actors use sacred language, identities, institutions, memories, and symbols to mobilize supporters, define enemies, legitimize coercion, or resist compromise. Because these processes can influence social cohesion, institutional trust, humanitarian action, and the capacity for cooperation and recovery, understanding the political activation of religion is relevant to planetary health. This conceptual integrative review synthesizes scholarship from conflict studies, political science, religious studies, law, psychology, public health, and peacebuilding to clarify how such politicization can be analyzed without reducing multidimensional conflicts to religion alone. This article proposes seven analytical dimensions: religious rhetoric in political discourse; religious identity as a boundary of group division; involvement of religious institutions and leaders; targeting of religious sites and symbols; religious justification of violence; religious framing of resistance to external intervention; and mobilization of historical grievances with religious content. These dimensions form a heuristic framework rather than a validated diagnostic instrument. From a planetary health perspective, the framework identifies pathways through which politicized religion can damage population health and the social and institutional systems on which health depends, including humanitarian access, public-health trust, displacement, cultural continuity, psychosocial well-being, social cohesion, and cooperative governance. The same religious resources may also support mediation, restraint, resilience, and reconciliation. This article links each dimension to proportionate peacebuilding and planetary health responses and identifies priorities for empirical validation, comparative coding, and longitudinal research.

1. Introduction

From a planetary health perspective, armed conflict threatens health and collective well-being through its disruption of interconnected human, institutional, cultural, and ecological systems.. Within this context, religion occupies an ambivalent place. It can provide moral restraint, resilience, mediation, and a language of reconciliation, but it can also be appropriated to sharpen group boundaries, sacralize political projects, and legitimize violence [1,2,3]. Politicized religious identities, narratives, and institutions can therefore influence social cohesion, institutional trust, humanitarian action, and the capacity for cooperation and recovery, while religious resources may also strengthen resilience, restraint, and reconciliation [4,5]. The analytical challenge is therefore not to decide whether religion is inherently peaceful or violent. It is to identify when, how, and with what consequences religious resources become politically consequential.

Armed conflicts are multidimensional. Political exclusion, security dilemmas, territorial claims, economic incentives, ethnic competition, institutional weakness, and environmental pressures may coexist with religious narratives. The relative importance of these dimensions can change during a conflict. Religion may initially be peripheral and later become prominent because leaders, armed groups, or institutions discover that sacred narratives mobilize support or make compromise more costly. Conversely, religious actors may de-escalate conflict by reframing obligations, protecting civilians, or mediating across group boundaries. Searching for conflicts caused exclusively by religion is therefore analytically unproductive [6,7,8,9].

Historical and contemporary cases illustrate this interaction. The Crusades, the European wars of religion, the Lebanese Civil War, the wars following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency, the persecution of the Rohingya, and conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Israel–Palestine all contain religious elements, but none can be understood without reference to political, territorial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or geopolitical factors. Religion may shape the identities, institutions, narratives, perceived stakes, and patterns of mobilization involved in these conflicts without constituting their sole or necessarily primary cause. The purpose of comparison is therefore not to place these conflicts in a single causal category, but to identify recurring mechanisms through which religious meanings operate within otherwise distinct conflict systems [6,7,8,9,10,11].

This approach also avoids imposing an unreliable distinction between sincere faith and “fanaticism.” The inner sincerity and relative weight of actors’ religious motivations cannot ordinarily be established from public evidence, and sincerely held beliefs may coexist with strategic, institutional, and material interests. Scholars have consequently cautioned against inferring religious motivation solely from actors’ identities, public declarations, or participation in organizations described as religious. A more defensible analytical task is to examine observable practices: who invokes religion, before which audiences, through which institutions, and in relation to what material or political objectives. Analysis should then consider the consequences for mobilization, exclusion, violence, restraint, or peacebuilding. Politicization in this article therefore refers to the translation of religious ideas, identities, authority, symbols, or historical memories into claims concerning political legitimacy, collective threat, group boundaries, or permissible action [8,9,11].

This article addresses two questions: (1) Which recurring dimensions make the political use of religion visible across different conflicts? (2) How can these dimensions improve analysis and peacebuilding without treating religion as a single or exclusive cause? Its principal contribution is a seven-dimensional heuristic framework that organizes dispersed scholarship into a structured set of questions. By identifying mechanisms through which politicized religion can affect social cohesion, institutional trust, humanitarian action, and cooperative capacity, the framework also provides a structured approach to examining an important cultural and institutional dimension of planetary health. The framework is intended to complement, not replace, established conflict theories such as the greed-versus-grievance debate, theories of ethnic mobilization, and institutional explanations of violence [8,12].

The planetary health significance of these mechanisms extends beyond the immediate effects of armed violence. Human well-being depends on stable, cooperative, and just social systems, as well as on the natural systems that sustain life [4]. Armed conflict damages health not only through death and injury but also through displacement, institutional collapse, disrupted food and water systems, degraded environments, loss of cultural continuity, and weakened capacity for collective action. Politicized religion can amplify these harms when it undermines trust in health and humanitarian institutions, legitimizes exclusion, or makes negotiated cooperation appear morally forbidden. Conversely, religious and spiritual traditions can strengthen solidarity, restraint, care, and shared purpose. Examining these pathways therefore contributes to planetary health by addressing the ethical, cultural, and institutional conditions required for people, communities, and places to flourish [5].

2. Conceptual Background

2.1. Religion Within Multidimensional Conflict

The greed-versus-grievance debate asks whether rebellion is better explained by opportunities and incentives for organized violence or by perceived injustice, inequality, and political exclusion [12]. Subsequent scholarship has shown that this opposition is often too rigid: material opportunities, governance failures, identity narratives, state capacity, and grievances may interact and reinforce one another rather than operate as mutually exclusive explanations [13,14]. Religion can enter this interaction as a source of collective identity, organizational infrastructure, political legitimacy, moral vocabulary, leadership authority, or transnational support. It should therefore be examined as a mechanism and field of meaning within a wider conflict system rather than presumed to constitute an autonomous root cause [8,9,11].

Religious salience also varies across analytical levels. At the international level, religious narratives may support civilizational identities, foreign-policy objectives, transnational alliances, or geopolitical claims [15,16]. At the intergroup level, religious affiliation may become a marker or proxy for ethnic, national, or communal identity and may be activated by political elites for mobilization [11,17]. At the state–citizen level, religious doctrines and institutions may influence law, citizenship, education, family policy, minority rights, and access to public institutions [6]. At the individual level, faith may shape coping, obedience, resistance, moral injury, forgiveness, and reconciliation [1,18,19]. These levels interact, but they should not be collapsed into one another, because evidence that religion matters at one level does not establish that it has the same function or causal importance at another.

2.2. From Religious Resource to Political Instrument

Political actors do not create religious traditions from nothing. They select, reinterpret, amplify, and institutionalize existing symbols and narratives. A sacred past may be transformed into a territorial claim; a doctrinal distinction into a political boundary; a religious leader into a broker of state legitimacy; or a moral prohibition into an exception that authorizes violence. The process is especially powerful where religious and national identities overlap and where institutions can repeatedly transmit the same narrative through worship, education, media, and law [20,21].

The same religious resources can operate in the opposite direction. Religious authorities may delegitimize attacks on civilians, mediate between conflicting groups, sponsor interfaith dialogue, facilitate humanitarian access, or reinterpret contested traditions in favor of restraint and reconciliation. Their effectiveness may derive from moral authority, social trust, local knowledge, institutional continuity, and access to constituencies that secular mediators cannot always reach. Religion should therefore be understood as an ambivalent social and political resource: the symbols, institutions, and narratives that can legitimate exclusion or violence may also be mobilized to challenge violence and support conflict transformation. The framework developed below is consequently symmetrical: it asks not only how religion intensifies conflict, but also whether religious actors and meanings constrain violence or facilitate peace [1,22].

2.3. Moral Agency, Violence, and Injury

Combatants and civilians face moral dilemmas that are not reducible to the origins of a conflict. Faith may help people endure fear, loss, displacement, and uncertainty [19,23]. It may also be used to suppress doubt by redefining lethal action as duty, sacrifice, martyrdom, or defense of the sacred. The relevant question is not whether individuals use religion during war—many do—but whether organized actors systematically connect religious obligation to political or military conduct.

When sacred authority is used to remove ordinary moral restraints, participants may later experience moral injury: distress arising from perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held commitments. This consequence links public rhetoric to individual harm and helps explain why religiously sacralized conflicts may leave durable barriers to reconciliation [18,24,25,26].

2.4. A Planetary Health Lens on Conflict, Culture, and Spirituality

Planetary health is commonly defined in terms of the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends [12]. Although the present framework focuses on political and cultural mechanisms rather than environmental-exposure measurement, its planetary health relevance follows from the systemic and frequently long-lasting consequences of armed conflict. War produces mortality and injury not only through direct violence but also through damage to health systems, water and sanitation services, food production, livelihoods, education, governance, housing, and essential infrastructure. These indirect effects can continue after active hostilities have ended and can extend across national borders through forced displacement, disease transmission, economic disruption, and pressure on neighboring health systems [27,28]. Armed conflict can also contaminate air, soil, and water; damage ecosystems; accelerate biodiversity loss; and impair the ecological services on which population health and recovery depend [29,30]. Conflict should therefore be understood not only as a military or political event but also as a systemic disturbance of interconnected human, institutional, and ecological systems.

Within this system perspective, ethics, values, culture, and spirituality are not peripheral to health. They influence how societies define responsibility, whose lives and environments are considered worthy of protection, and whether public institutions and humanitarian actors are trusted. They also influence how suffering and loss are interpreted, and whether collective responses are organized around solidarity, reciprocity, exclusion, or revenge. Planetary health scholarship increasingly recognizes that dominant values, worldviews, governance arrangements, relationships with place, and conceptions of human–nature interdependence shape both the production of planetary crises and the capacity to respond to them [31,32]. Cultural identity and continuity may also support meaning, resilience, social connection, and recovery following collective disruption, whereas attacks on cultural and sacred institutions can deepen displacement and psychosocial harm [33]. The framework therefore treats politicized religion as a potential upstream determinant of planetary health and constructive religious engagement as a potential resource for resilience, reconciliation, and peace. This framing does not equate planetary health simply with the absence of conflict; rather, it identifies peace, justice, institutional trust, cultural continuity, social inclusion, and ecological security as mutually reinforcing conditions for sustained human and planetary well-being.

3. Methodological Approach

3.1. Review Design and Rationale

This study uses a conceptual integrative review to develop an analytical framework for examining the political activation of religion in multidimensional conflict. An integrative review is appropriate when a problem is fragmented across disciplines, studied through heterogeneous methods, and in need of conceptual synthesis rather than statistical aggregation. A systematic review aims to identify an exhaustive and reproducible corpus in response to a narrowly specified question. In contrast, a conceptual integrative review critically compares representative theoretical, empirical, historical, and normative sources to generate new categories, relationships, or propositions [34,35,36]. The present review therefore seeks conceptual coverage and explanatory variation rather than prevalence estimates, effect sizes, or a claim that all relevant publications have been retrieved.

This design also differs from unstructured desk research. This review was guided by an explicit question, defined analytical boundaries, stated source-selection principles, a staged synthesis procedure, and tests of conceptual distinctiveness. These procedures are reported retrospectively because the source base was assembled iteratively rather than through a prospectively registered protocol. This manuscript consequently does not describe itself as systematic, scoping, or PRISMA-compliant, and it does not claim reproducibility in the strict sense of recreating an identical corpus. Its more limited claim is methodological transparency: readers should be able to understand how the source base was bounded, how evidence was used, and how the seven dimensions were constructed.

3.2. Review Question, Unit of Analysis, and Scope

This review was guided by the following question: Through which observable mechanisms does religion become politically salient in multidimensional armed conflicts, and how can these mechanisms be organized into a coherent conceptual framework without treating religion as either an exclusive or universal cause of violence? The unit of analysis was not the conflict as a whole, but the specific ways in which religious ideas, identities, institutions, authorities, symbols, and historical memories were connected to political legitimacy, group mobilization, exclusion, violence, restraint, or peacebuilding. This mechanism-centered approach permits comparison across conflicts that differ substantially in time, region, political system, religious tradition, and intensity [36,37,38].

This review included scholarship addressing armed conflict, political violence, religious nationalism, sectarian mobilization, religious institutions, moral injury, mediation, humanitarian intervention, legal order, and peacebuilding. Historical and contemporary cases were considered when they clarified a recurring mechanism or challenged an emerging category. This review did not attempt to determine whether conflicts were fundamentally “religious,” nor did it seek to rank conflicts according to the degree of religious causation. Such classifications are often unreliable because religion may interact with territorial, ethnic, economic, institutional, and geopolitical forces, and its importance may change over the course of a conflict [8,9,11].

The analytical scope was therefore limited to observable political uses and consequences of religion. Claims about the private sincerity, psychological condition, or ultimate motives of individual actors were excluded unless supported by direct and credible evidence. The framework focuses instead on public discourse, institutional arrangements, political practices, symbolic actions, and documented consequences. This boundary enables analysis of religion as a political and social mechanism without assuming that public religious language necessarily reflects either genuine devotion or cynical manipulation.

3.3. Source Identification and Selection

The source-identification and selection process was iterative and purposive rather than exhaustive. The principles outlined below describe how sources were judged relevant to this article’s conceptual aims; they should not be understood as prospectively registered eligibility criteria applied to a closed, comprehensively identified, and reproducible corpus.

This approach was chosen because the relevant literature is distributed across multiple disciplines and employs different terms for related phenomena. These include religious conflict, sectarianism, sacred violence, religious nationalism, political theology, faith-based mediation, identity mobilization, moral injury, and peacebuilding. Iterative searching and purposive selection are appropriate for an integrative review that seeks to compare and synthesize conceptually diverse and differently labelled bodies of scholarship, rather than to identify exhaustively every publication within a narrowly bounded field [36,38].

Priority was given to peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books, book chapters, and authoritative institutional reports that contributed directly to one or more of this review’s analytical concerns. Sources were included when they examined how religion influenced political discourse, collective identity, institutional authority, legal or moral justification, historical grievance, or resistance to external intervention. Sources addressing its relationship to violence, restraint, mediation, or reconciliation were also included. Both theoretical and empirical publications were considered because the purpose of this review was conceptual development across disciplinary boundaries. Selection was based on relevance, conceptual contribution, evidentiary credibility, and capacity to clarify or challenge the emerging framework rather than on a numerical quality score applied across fundamentally different forms of evidence [34,38].

Sources were excluded when they referred to religion only or incidentally, lacked a clear relationship to conflict or peace processes, repeated unsupported polemical claims, or could not contribute to the development or critical testing of the framework. Non-academic sources were used sparingly and only when they provided primary statements, legal texts, official policy positions, or contextual information unavailable in scholarly publications. Illustrative cases were not selected as a representative or exhaustive sample of world conflicts. They were chosen because they demonstrated a mechanism, revealed variation, or exposed a limitation in the proposed categories.

The search and selection process was not systematic in the PRISMA sense. No complete database-by-database search log, deduplicated corpus, numerical screening flow, or exhaustive record of excluded sources was available. This study therefore does not claim comprehensive coverage or reproducibility equivalent to a systematic review. This limitation is addressed by making the selection logic explicit and restricting this article’s claims to conceptual synthesis and framework development rather than prevalence estimation or causal measurement [36].

3.4. Analytical Synthesis and Framework Development

The analytical process followed a staged procedure informed by established approaches to integrative review and conceptual-framework development [34,37,38]. First, relevant publications were read for recurring descriptions of how religion entered conflict processes. Attention was directed to actors, audiences, institutions, narratives, symbols, historical references, political objectives, and reported effects on mobilization, exclusion, violence, restraint, or peace.

Second, recurrent mechanisms were recorded using preliminary descriptive labels. Examples included the use of sacred language by political leaders, the transformation of religious affiliation into a political boundary, the endorsement of political objectives by religious institutions, attacks on sacred sites, theological authorization of violence, resistance to external intervention, and mobilization through historical religious grievance. At this stage, labels were intentionally broad to avoid imposing fixed categories before comparison across cases and disciplines.

Third, the preliminary labels were compared, differentiated, and consolidated into provisional conceptual categories. Mechanisms were grouped when they described closely related processes, while categories were separated when they involved distinct actors, forms of evidence, or pathways of influence. This iterative movement between individual sources, preliminary concepts, and the developing framework is consistent with integrative synthesis and conceptual-framework analysis [34,37].

Fourth, the provisional categories were examined against negative and complicating cases. Attention was given to cases in which religious actors opposed violence, supported humanitarian access, mediated between groups, or challenged political manipulation. This step was necessary to prevent the framework from assuming that religion functions only as a driver of conflict. It also supported a symmetrical formulation in which the same analytical dimension may intensify violence in one context and facilitate restraint or reconciliation in another.

Fifth, overlapping categories were refined and their conceptual boundaries clarified. The final seven dimensions were required to be conceptually distinct, observable in more than one setting, applicable without presuming religious causation, and capable of future operationalization. These criteria reflect the purpose of conceptual-framework analysis: to organize interrelated concepts into a coherent structure that improves understanding of a complex phenomenon and guides subsequent empirical investigation [37].

Sixth, each dimension was defined in terms of its central question, observable manifestations, possible sources of evidence, and analytical cautions. The framework was then applied interpretively to selected historical and contemporary cases to examine whether the categories were sufficiently flexible to capture variation without collapsing different conflicts into a single causal model.

The resulting framework functions as a structured heuristic rather than a validated measurement scale. The number of dimensions present in a conflict does not determine whether that conflict is “religious,” nor does the framework establish the relative causal weight of religion compared with political, territorial, economic, or security factors. Its purpose is to organize inquiry into the mechanisms through which religion becomes politically consequential.

No qualitative data-analysis software was used to generate or validate the framework. The identification, comparison, and consolidation of concepts were conducted through manual reading, note-taking, and iterative comparison of the selected literature. Category development therefore depended on the author’s interpretive judgment, which is acknowledged as a limitation of this review [36,38].

The contemporary Iran–United States case was considered only after the seven-dimensional framework had been formulated. It was included as a provisional application of the completed framework and did not contribute to the original derivation of the dimensions.

3.5. Strategies for Analytical Rigor

Several strategies were used to strengthen the conceptual credibility of this review. These included comparison across disciplinary literatures, variation in historical and geographical cases, attention to counterexamples, explicit differentiation between religious presence and religious causation, calibration of claims to the review design, and separation of framework-building material from later illustrative application. Such strategies are consistent with recommendations for transparent and critically integrative literature synthesis [34,36,38].

Conceptual definitions were repeatedly examined for overlap. A dimension was retained only when it captured a distinguishable mechanism that could be identified through public evidence. For example, religious rhetoric was separated from institutional religious involvement because political actors may use religious language without formal support from religious authorities, while religious institutions may influence conflict without relying primarily on public rhetoric. Similarly, religious identity as a group boundary was distinguished from historical grievance because present-day identity classification and inherited memories of persecution may operate through different pathways.

The categories are described as analytical dimensions rather than validated indicators because no empirical thresholds, scoring rules, sensitivity, specificity, or predictive validity have yet been established. The term “dimension” also emphasizes that religious influence is variable, relational, and context-dependent rather than simply present or absent. The framework is intended to guide structured analysis, not to produce a definitive classification from a numerical count.

Analytical caution was also applied to causal language. The presence of religious discourse, institutions, or symbols does not in itself demonstrate that religion caused a conflict or a particular act of violence. Wherever possible, the analysis distinguishes among religious justification, institutional participation, identity mobilization, strategic instrumentalization, and independently documented political or material objectives.

Supplementary File S1 shows an overview of the method section and analytical procedure.

4. A Seven-Dimensional Framework for Analyzing Politicized Religion

The framework uses the term analytical dimensions rather than diagnostic indicators. ‘Indicator’ can imply a validated measure with known sensitivity and specificity, whereas the present dimensions are structured prompts for identifying observable evidence. They indicate ways in which religion may become politically salient; they do not establish that religion caused a conflict, that all seven dimensions must be present, or that a conflict is ‘religious’.

4.1. Religious Rhetoric in Political Discourse

This dimension concerns the deliberate use of sacred language to authorize political projects. Relevant evidence includes speeches, sermons, manifestos, official media, campaign materials, and educational texts that describe leaders, territories, wars, or policies as divinely mandated, sacred, redemptive, or necessary to defend a religious civilization. Such rhetoric can transform disagreement into sacrilege and make concessions appear morally illegitimate. Russian religious-national narratives concerning the war in Ukraine and Hindu-nationalist rhetoric in India illustrate how religious and national identities may be fused in political discourse [39,40,41]. The analytical caution is that religious vocabulary alone is insufficient; researchers should examine repetition, institutional sponsorship, target audience, and connection to concrete political action.

4.2. Religious Identity as a Boundary of Group Division

This dimension asks whether religious affiliation becomes a politically enforced boundary between an in-group and an out-group. Affiliation may serve as a proxy for ethnicity, nationality, region, class, or political loyalty. In Lebanon and Northern Ireland, for example, religious labels mapped onto broader political and national alignments rather than operating as isolated theological disputes [42,43]. Evidence may include segregated institutions, discriminatory citizenship rules, militia recruitment, identity-based voting, forced labeling, or public claims that members of one faith cannot be loyal citizens. The caution is to avoid mistaking correlation for causation: a religious label may mark a cleavage whose principal drivers lie elsewhere.

4.3. Involvement of Religious Institutions and Leaders

Formal religious organizations and prominent leaders can shape conflict through endorsement, silence, mediation, humanitarian action, financing, recruitment, or control of community institutions. Their authority may intensify conflict when they sanction exclusion or violence, as occurred in parts of the former Yugoslavia and in anti-Rohingya Buddhist nationalism. The same authority can reduce violence when leaders create interfaith platforms, protect threatened groups, or provide credible mediation [1,2,44]. Analysis should distinguish official institutional positions from the actions of individual clergy and should document internal dissent rather than treating a religion as a unitary actor.

4.4. Targeting of Religious Sites, Practices, or Symbols

Attacks on places of worship, cemeteries, schools, texts, dress, ritual practice, and sacred heritage may signal an attempt to terrorize, displace, humiliate, or erase a community. The destruction of mosques and churches during the Bosnian War, for example, carried symbolic and demographic meanings beyond immediate military utility [45,46]. Yet, not every damaged religious site demonstrates religious motivation; researchers should examine patterns of selection, statements by perpetrators, military context, and whether the attack forms part of a broader strategy of cultural destruction or forced displacement.

4.5. Religious Justification of Violence

This dimension concerns explicit claims that doctrine, scripture, divine command, martyrdom, holy war, or defense of the sacred permits or requires violence. Groups such as ISIS have used selective theological interpretation to make coercion and killing appear obligatory [47]. Similar mechanisms may occur in other traditions when political actors elevate exceptional doctrines and suppress traditions of restraint. Evidence should include authoritative texts, training materials, rulings, sermons, or testimony linking religious obligation to specific acts. Analysts should avoid attributing fringe interpretations to entire faith communities and should examine competing interpretations that reject violence.

4.6. Religious Framing of Resistance to External Intervention

Humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, vaccination, legal monitoring, or mediation may be rejected through claims that external actors threaten faith, purity, sovereignty, or communal survival [48,49]. The polio vaccination boycott in northern Nigeria demonstrates how religiously framed conspiracy narratives can transform a health intervention into a struggle over identity and political trust [48]. The relevant mechanism is not doctrinal opposition alone but the political use of religious authority to discredit outside institutions. Researchers should also investigate nonreligious causes of resistance, including prior abuses, colonial memory, poor communication, and weak service delivery.

4.7. Mobilization of Historical Grievances with Religious Content

Political actors often reactivate memories of persecution, conquest, displacement, desecration, or martyrdom. These memories can connect present disputes to a sacred historical narrative, enlarging the stakes and lengthening the time horizon of grievance. Israel–Palestine, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and several Middle Eastern conflicts show how religious history can become intertwined with land, nationhood, and security [3,10]. Historical grievances should be analyzed as constructed and contested memories: researchers should ask who selects the past, which episodes are omitted, how the narrative is transmitted, and whether it is used to justify present exclusion or to support reconciliation.

5. Applying the Framework

The seven dimensions can be used in comparative case studies, discourse analysis, conflict mapping, policy assessment, and longitudinal research. Application should begin with a clearly bounded case and period, because religious salience can change over time. Researchers should triangulate public rhetoric with institutional behavior, legal documents, media, interviews, event data, and material patterns of violence. A dimension should be coded only when evidence connects a religious resource to political mobilization, exclusion, legitimation, resistance, restraint, or reconciliation [50,51,52,53] (Table 1).

Table 1. Operational questions for empirical use of the framework.

Dimension	Guiding Question	Potential Evidence	Key Caution
Religious rhetoric	How often and by whom are political goals described as sacred, divinely authorized, or necessary to defend faith?	Speeches, sermons, manifestos, official media	Rhetoric may be ceremonial without behavioral effect.
Identity boundary	Does affiliation determine loyalty, citizenship, recruitment, segregation, or victim selection?	Laws, voting patterns, militia records, interviews	Religion may proxy ethnicity, region, or class.
Institutions/leaders	Do religious bodies endorse, fund, mediate, resist, or restrain conflict actors?	Institutional statements, budgets, mediation records	Religious communities contain internal disagreement.
Sites/symbols	Are sacred sites or practices selectively targeted, protected, or instrumentalized?	Event data, satellite evidence, perpetrator statements	Collateral damage must be distinguished from symbolic targeting.
Justification of violence	Is violence framed as religious duty, martyrdom, purification, or defense of the sacred?	Rulings, training materials, sermons, testimony	Fringe doctrine must not be generalized.
Resistance to intervention	Is external assistance rejected through religious threat narratives?	Campaign materials, public-health records, interviews	Distrust may also reflect historical abuse or governance failure.
Historical grievance	Are selected religious memories used to define present enemies and claims?	Curricula, commemorations, speeches, monuments	Memory is selective and politically constructed.

5.1. A Provisional Coding Logic

For exploratory research, each dimension may be coded on a simple ordinal scale: 0 = no credible evidence in the bounded period; 1 = present but limited or contested; 2 = prominent and repeatedly connected to political or violent action. Scores should not be summed into a universal index until the dimensions have been validated, because their consequences and evidentiary strength are not necessarily equivalent. The value of coding is comparative transparency: it requires researchers to show why a dimension was judged present and how it changed over time [51,53].

The framework can also record direction. A religious institution may intensify one process while restraining another. For example, a leader may reinforce group identity yet oppose attacks on civilians. Coding should therefore preserve ambivalence rather than forcing actors into categories of “peaceful” or “violent” [1,22].

5.2. Mechanism and Interaction Among Dimensions

A common pathway begins when political entrepreneurs connect a grievance or objective to sacred rhetoric. The rhetoric sharpens an identity boundary and recruits institutional authority. Historical memories and symbolic sites then give the boundary emotional and territorial depth. Doctrinal claims may lower moral barriers to violence, while narratives of religious threat discredit external mediation. This is not a fixed sequence: dimensions can appear in different orders, remain dormant, or be interrupted by counternarratives and institutional restraint [11,54,55,56,57].

The framework thus links consciousness to practice. It traces how narratives become organizational commitments, policies, victim selection, attacks on symbols, or resistance to peace efforts. It also identifies intervention points: counter-rhetoric may be insufficient when discriminatory law or armed institutions already sustain the boundary [14,57,58,59].

6. Discussion

6.1. Theoretical Contribution

The framework’s contribution is organizational and relational rather than monocausal. It consolidates mechanisms that are often studied separately and places them within a common analytic structure. In doing so, it clarifies how religion can interact with greed, grievance, ethnicity, nationalism, state institutions, and geopolitical competition. The model does not identify a new class of exclusively faith-based wars. Instead, it helps explain variation in the salience and political use of religion within multidimensional conflicts [8,9,11,12,14].

The framework also improves conceptual precision by separating presence from politicization. Religious populations, personal prayer, or faith-based coping do not by themselves make a conflict religious. Politicization becomes analytically relevant when actors connect religious resources to authority, boundaries, permissible violence, policy, intervention, or historical claims. This distinction answers the problem of inferring motivation from identity alone [8,9,11].

A further contribution is temporal. Most typologies treat a case as though its religious character were stable. The seven dimensions can instead be tracked across phases of mobilization, escalation, negotiation, and post-conflict reconstruction. Such analysis may show that religion is activated strategically, institutionalized over time, or redirected toward peace [3,59].

Taken together, the seven dimensions improve analysis in three ways. First, they separate the observable political activation of religion from the mere presence of religious populations, identities, or practices. Second, they direct attention to distinct mechanisms—rhetorical, institutional, identity-based, symbolic, doctrinal, intervention-related, and historical—rather than assigning religion a single causal role. Third, they support proportionate peacebuilding by linking interventions to the mechanism identified. The framework therefore does not ask whether a conflict is “religious” in absolute terms; it asks how, when, and through which pathways religious resources become politically consequential, and where those pathways may be interrupted, redirected, or mobilized for peace.

6.2. Implications for Peacebuilding

Recommendations should follow from the mechanism identified rather than from a general assumption that secularization will solve conflict. Constitutional neutrality and equal citizenship can reduce domination by a single tradition. However, rigid exclusion of religion from public life may alienate communities or remove credible mediators. The appropriate goal is political and legal arrangements that protect freedom of religion or belief, prevent discrimination and incitement, and maintain accountability for public authority [1,2,22,57,59,60].

Where sacred rhetoric drives escalation, religiously literate counter-messaging and public documentation of manipulation may be useful [60,61]. Where identity boundaries are institutionalized, reforms to citizenship, representation, education, and security practice are more important than dialogue alone [14]. Where religious leaders possess community trust, insider mediation and protection networks can be supported while preserving pluralism and avoiding the selection of a single “official” interlocutor [1,58]. Where sites are targeted, heritage protection and reconstruction should be integrated with return, justice, and security [45,46]. Where violence is doctrinally justified, credible internal theological contestation may complement legal and military responses [3,22]. Where interventions are framed as religious threats, trusted local partnerships and attention to historical distrust are essential [48]. Where grievance narratives dominate, peacebuilding should address both material injustice and contested memory [57,58,62].

Trauma-informed approaches are relevant across the dimensions because sacralized conflict can intensify shame, guilt, betrayal, and moral injury. Psychosocial support should not instrumentalize faith, but it should allow affected people to draw on religious and nonreligious sources of meaning while challenging narratives that normalize revenge [18,63,64].

6.3. Implications for Planetary Health and the Sustainable Development Goals

The seven dimensions identify upstream pathways connecting political uses of religion to planetary health outcomes. Sacred political rhetoric can weaken epistemic trust and cooperative governance. Religious identity boundaries can produce unequal citizenship, displacement, and discriminatory access to protection, health care, food, water, and education. Religious institutions can either obstruct or facilitate vaccination, humanitarian access, psychosocial support, and mediation. Attacks on sacred sites can destroy cultural heritage, place attachment, community networks, and sources of meaning. Religious authorization of violence increases mortality, trauma, moral injury, and cycles of retaliation. Religious framing of outside intervention can undermine public-health and humanitarian action. Mobilized historical grievances can transmit distrust and trauma across generations [27,28,32,33,48].

The framework also highlights positive pathways. Trusted religious actors can correct misinformation, protect vulnerable groups, support nonviolent norms, sustain care networks, and create shared moral language for reconciliation and environmental stewardship. Such engagement should remain pluralistic, rights-based, and accountable; it should not grant religious institutions immunity from scrutiny or substitute spiritual language for material remedies [1,22,31,32].

These implications align most directly with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 on peace, justice, and strong institutions. They also support SDG 3 through protection of health and psychosocial well-being, SDG 10 through reduction in identity-based exclusion, and SDG 17 through trusted partnerships across public institutions, civil society, and faith communities. Because the SDGs are integrated, progress in these areas can strengthen the capacity to address environmental disruption and other transboundary threats that require durable cooperation [12,31,64,65].

6.4. A Provisional Application: The 2026 Iran–United States Conflict

The 2026 conflict between Iran and the United States provides a contemporary illustration of both the utility and the limits of the proposed framework. The hostilities that began on 28 February 2026 ended under a ceasefire ordered on 7 April 2026, followed by a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran on 17 June 2026. The conflict was primarily structured by geopolitical and security concerns, including Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, United States and allied security objectives, maritime navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, regional alliances, sanctions, and regime survival. It would therefore be analytically misleading to characterize it as an exclusively, or even predominantly, religious war. Nevertheless, religious narratives appear to have influenced the way the conflict was interpreted, legitimized, and communicated [66,67,68,69].

The case is particularly important because Iran’s religious dimension is not limited to symbolic rhetoric or post hoc justification. The Islamic Republic constitutionally integrates religious and political authority through the doctrine of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. The Supreme Leader is both a senior religious authority and the state’s highest political and military decision-maker. The office has responsibility for defining general state policy and commanding the armed forces. Religious doctrine may therefore enter conflict decision-making at the institutional level, shaping interpretations of sovereignty, resistance, sacrifice, legitimacy, and relations with external powers [70,71,72].

This institutional fusion distinguishes Iran from political systems in which leaders merely borrow religious language to mobilize supporters. In the Iranian system, theological authority provides part of the constitutional basis of political authority itself. Consequently, religious beliefs may influence how military decisions are communicated. They may also influence how strategic interests and acceptable courses of action are understood. Concepts such as martyrdom, resistance to oppression, protection of the Islamic order, and religious duty can become intertwined with more conventional considerations, including deterrence, regime survival, regional influence, nuclear policy, and control of strategic waterways [73,74,75].

Several dimensions of the framework are therefore provisionally observable. Dimension 1 (religious rhetoric) is visible in this discourse. Iranian political and religious discourse draws upon martyrdom, sacred resistance, divine justice, and the defense of an Islamic political order. Such narratives can transform military sacrifice into a religious obligation and portray compromise as a betrayal of both faith and national identity. Dimension 3 (involvement of religious institutions and leaders) is especially relevant. Religious institutions are especially relevant because Iran’s constitutional structure integrates clerical and political authority, allowing theological narratives to influence state legitimacy, conflict mobilization, and potentially the formulation of policy. Dimension 1 is also potentially relevant on the United States side. On the United States side, references to divine favor, morally absolute victory, or civilizational confrontation may contribute to the sacralization of otherwise strategic military objectives. These forms of rhetoric do not demonstrate that religion alone caused the war; rather, they show how religious authority and language may reinforce political narratives, elevate the moral stakes of conflict, and narrow the perceived legitimacy of compromise [69,74,75,76,77].

The existence of a religious Supreme Leader does not establish that every Iranian decision is primarily theological. Religious conviction, institutional interests, military advice, economic pressure, domestic legitimacy, and geopolitical calculation may operate together. The analytical task is therefore not to choose between religion and strategy, but to examine how religious authority structures the decision-making environment and how theological and strategic rationales reinforce, constrain, or occasionally contradict one another [72,75,76].

The conflict also illustrates the interaction between religious framing and historical grievance. This corresponds particularly to Dimension 7 (mobilization of historical grievances with religious content). Iranian narratives are embedded in memories of foreign intervention, the 1979 Revolution, sanctions, assassinations, proxy conflicts, and perceived Western hostility toward the Islamic Republic. United States narratives, in turn, emphasize hostage-taking, attacks on American forces, support for armed proxies, nuclear proliferation, and threats to regional allies. Political actors can selectively arrange these memories into morally coherent stories of victimhood and defensive necessity. The result is a reciprocal process in which each party presents its violence as defensive and the opponent’s violence as inherently illegitimate [61,76,77].

From a planetary health perspective, the case demonstrates how politicized narratives can magnify consequences beyond the immediate battlefield. Disruption of maritime trade, threats to energy and water infrastructure, population displacement, damage to health systems, regional insecurity, psychological trauma, and the erosion of diplomatic cooperation can affect communities far removed from the conflict itself. The case therefore supports the broader argument that the political weaponization of religion should be analyzed not as an isolated cause of war but as one potential mechanism through which multidimensional conflicts become morally absolutized, socially entrenched, and more damaging to human and planetary well-being [27,28,66,67,78].

Because the conflict has only recently concluded and its political consequences remain unsettled, this analysis is necessarily provisional. It is offered as an illustration of how the framework might guide near-real-time analysis, not as a definitive case classification. Future research should systematically examine official speeches, clerical statements, military communications, media narratives, and public responses over the full conflict cycle before drawing conclusions about the relative importance of religious framing [50,51].

6.5. Research Agenda

The next step is empirical validation. A preregistered review should define databases, complete search strings, dates, languages, screening stages, inclusion criteria, and the number and disciplinary distribution of included sources. Independent coders should test whether the seven dimensions can be identified reliably. Comparative case studies should include positive, negative, and changing cases: conflicts with highly visible politicized religion, conflicts in which religion remains marginal, and cases in which religious actors shift from escalation to mediation. Longitudinal studies should examine sequencing and interaction. Do rhetorical shifts precede changes in victim selection? Does institutional endorsement make doctrinal justification more influential? Under what conditions do interfaith initiatives alter law, armed-group behavior, or public attitudes? Answering these questions would convert the present heuristic into a testable middle-range theory. Comparative applications to additional conflicts, including cases with different religious, political, and regional configurations, should form part of this next phase of empirical testing.

7. Limitations

This review has several limitations. First, the purposive and non-systematic source-selection process does not provide the reproducibility, comprehensive coverage, or numerical screening transparency expected of a systematic review. Relevant studies may therefore have been omitted, particularly those published outside the disciplines, languages, and publication venues most accessible to the author. Second, this review was conducted by a single author. No independent coding, inter-rater comparison, or external validation exercise was performed. The identification, comparison, and consolidation of concepts consequently depended on the author’s interpretive judgment, and interpretive bias remains possible.

Third, the framework is conceptual rather than empirically validated. The seven dimensions have not yet been tested as a measurement instrument, and no thresholds, weighting system, reliability estimates, sensitivity, specificity, or predictive validity have been established. The presence of several dimensions in a conflict should therefore not be interpreted as proof that the conflict is primarily religious or that religion carries greater causal weight than political, territorial, economic, ethnic, or security factors. Fourth, the integration of historical and contemporary cases across different regions and religious traditions creates a risk of decontextualization. The cases are used to illustrate recurring mechanisms rather than to suggest causal equivalence or to provide an exhaustive comparative history.

Fifth, applications to active conflicts are necessarily provisional. Rapidly changing events, strategic disinformation, restricted access to primary evidence, and the absence of historical distance limit reliable assessment. This is particularly relevant to the contemporary Iran–United States case, which is included as an illustrative application rather than as evidence used to derive the framework.

The framework should therefore be regarded as a conceptually grounded proposal requiring further testing by additional researchers using transparent corpora, multiple coders, comparative case designs, discourse analysis, interviews, event data, and mixed methods. Future studies should assess whether the dimensions can be operationalized reliably, whether additional or alternative dimensions are required, how the dimensions interact over time, and under what conditions particular mechanisms intensify conflict, constrain violence, or support peace.

8. Conclusions

Religion does not need to be the sole or original cause of a conflict to become politically consequential. Its salience can increase or decrease as actors mobilize sacred rhetoric, identity boundaries, institutional authority, symbolic targets, doctrines of violence, resistance narratives, and historical memory. The seven-dimensional framework provides a disciplined way to examine those processes while retaining the political, economic, ethnic, territorial, and social complexity of conflict.

The framework is best understood as a heuristic for transparent inquiry, not a diagnostic label. Its practical value lies in matching peacebuilding responses to specific mechanisms and in recognizing that religious resources can support either escalation or restraint. From a planetary health perspective, preventing the weaponization of religion and supporting accountable, pluralistic religious engagement can protect social cohesion, humanitarian access, institutional trust, cultural continuity, and the cooperative capacity required to respond to interconnected threats. Its scholarly value will depend on future validation through reproducible reviews, comparative cases, independent coding, and longitudinal analysis.