War and the Reconstitution of Religious-Political Order: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

Wars are usually studied as contests over territory, power, and survival. This panel asks a different question: what does war do to the relationship between religion and political authority?
The dominant literature treats religion as an input to conflict: a cause of violence, a marker of identity, a resource for recruitment. This panel inverts that framing. It treats war as a productive event: an experience that reorganises religious meaning, revives dormant symbolic repertoires, redistributes religious authority, and rewrites the terms on which states claim legitimacy. Sacrifice, martyrdom, defence, and siege are not only mobilisation slogans; they are categories through which political reality is made intelligible. War is the moment when such categories are forged, reactivated, or exhausted.
The panel is deliberately comparative and not confined to one region or tradition. We welcome papers on the current confrontation between Iran and the United States, Israel, and their allies; the war in Ukraine and the competing claims of Orthodox churches; religious Zionism and Israeli military doctrine; Hindu-nationalist framings of the India–Pakistan rivalry; armed conflict in the Sahel and Nigeria; post-Assad Syria; and historical cases that clarify the mechanism.
Three questions organise the panel. First, how does war reactivate, transform, or discredit religious-political discourse? Second, how does war reallocate authority between religious institutions, states, and armed movements? Third, how do religious frameworks travel across borders in wartime, and what do they carry with them?
The third question is central rather than supplementary. Wartime religious-political formations are rarely contained within states. They operate through transnational circuits: Iran, Iraq, and Hezbollah; evangelical and diaspora support for Israel; Orthodox networks spanning Russia and Ukraine; pan-Islamic and pan-Christian solidarities. Understanding these circuits is a condition of explanation, not an addition to it.
The panel speaks to the Congress theme by examining how political orders under external pressure generate legitimacy when institutional and material sources have been exhausted — a problem that is not confined to authoritarian states.