Islamic Conflict and Violence in Local Communities: Lessons from the North Caucasus

The internal dynamics of religiously motivated confrontations based on local community divides can trigger radicalization and violence, also outside the local community. However, theories on radicalization and conflict rarely take into account the significance of such local confrontations. In this article a three-stage model of such local Islamic conflict - conflict disagreement, conflict divide, and conflict violence - is elaborated, based on rich ethnographic material from the North Caucasus. The causes of conflict intensification and/or conflict moderation are discussed, as is the correlation between local conflicts and violent mobilizations. Ways of incorporating outcomes from local conflict research into conflict and radicalization theories are presented at the end.