Sectarian violence

Sectarian violence and/or sectarian strife is a form of communal violence inspired by sectarianism, that is, between different sects of one particular mode of ideology or religion within a nation/community. Religious segregation often plays a role in sectarian violence.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:

Traditionally, sectarian violence implies a symmetrical confrontation between two or more non-state actors representing different population groups.

Sectarian violence differs from the concept of race riot. It may involve the dynamics of social polarization, the balkanization of a geographic area along the lines of self-identifying groups, and protracted social conflict.

Some of the possible enabling environments for sectarian violence include power struggles, political climate, social climate, cultural climate, and economic landscape.

Although the First Crusade was initially launched in response to an appeal from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos for help in repelling the invading Seljuq Turks from Anatolia, one of the lasting legacies of the Crusades was to "further separate the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity from each other."

Following the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a series of wars were waged in Europe starting circa 1524 and continuing intermittently until 1648. Although sometimes unconnected, all of these wars were strongly influenced by the religious change of the period, and the conflict and rivalry that it produced. According to Miroslav Volf, the European wars of religion were a major factor behind the "emergence of secularizing modernity".

In the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre followers of the Roman Catholic Church killed up to 30,000 Huguenots (French Protestants) in mob violence. The massacres were carried out on the national day celebrating Bartholomew the Apostle. Pope Gregory XIII sent the leader of the massacres a Golden Rose, and said that the massacres "gave him more pleasure than fifty Battles of Lepanto, and he commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint frescoes of it in the Vatican". The killings have been called "the worst of the century's religious massacres", and led to the start of the fourth war of the French Wars of Religion.

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Wikipedia