In the coastal regions of Syria, where Alawite communities predominate, disturbing mobile phone footage of mass atrocities captured by Syrian rebels documents the horrific aftermath of their purported security operations against “regime remnants.” Most victims were ordinary civilians from the Alawite minority sect. They were subjected to humiliation and torture before being executed en masse by Sunni armed men. They were targeted for their perceived loyalty to the recently toppled government of Bashar Al-Assad, an Alawite leader who continued his father Hafez’s practice of elevating Alawites to key positions in political and security institutions—a strategy clearly designed to coup-proof the regime against potential threats from Syria’s Sunni majority. Yet not all minority groups in Syria have encountered a similar fate. For now, the Druze, Kurds, and Christians have escaped exterminationist violence, even though they, too, were not religiously, ideologically, or politically aligned with the goals of the rebel movement (Christians did not join the rebellion against Assad, probably because they preferred him over Islamists, and the Kurds struck a deal with Assad in 2012 to rule their regions in the north). What explains this form of targeted violence against some minority religious communities but not others?

Tezcür’s Liminal Minorities speaks directly to the phenomenon of mass killings against religious minorities, so his book could not have been timelier. Liminal minorities are defined as religious communities that “lack theological recognition and social acceptance from a dominant religious group” (7). They are deprived of respect and equal treatment when it comes to their religious beliefs and practices. Liminal minorities include Yezidis in Iraq, Bahais in Iran, Ahmadis in Pakistan, and Scientologists in several western states. Their liminality has been socially constructed over the centuries and usually develops at critical periods of state formation, when emerging ruling elites consolidate their religious legitimacy by drawing sharp boundaries between the preferred religious creed framed as orthodoxy and illegitimate faith framed as heresy. Liminal minorities usually experience several episodes of mass killings throughout history. Thus, contemporary manifestations of atrocities are in continuity with past practices and are legitimated in the present through retrieval of older myths and narratives that historically justified the exclusion of religious minorities from the universe of moral obligation.

Tezcür’s main argument is this: the combination of religious stigmatization and political resentment makes a propitious condition for religious violence. Mass publics are willing—and even eager—to participate in this violence because “the desire to please God remains a powerful motivator of political action…” (22).

Tezcür’s thesis challenges the new scholarly consensus concerning anti-civilian atrocities, largely dominated by rationalist-instrumentalist approaches that emphasize the strategic nature of violence. These approaches highlight how elite activation of ethnoreligious differences resulting in intercommunal violence can generate support for seizing or maintaining political power for one’s co-ethnic or co-religionist faction in a polity fragmented by multiple ethnicities, religions, and sects. Rebels, too, target civilians for several strategic purposes, including punishing civilian collaboration with the government, eliminating potentially disloyal populations from rebel territory, gaining access to vital resources through plunder, undermining the government’s legitimacy by highlighting its inability to protect the population, and recruiting children into the rebel army.

Tezcür rejects the presumed generalizability of instrumentalism, asserting several claims that recast the role of religious identities as central to the production of violence against minority religious communities. First, he argues that there is such a thing as religious violence as opposed to instrumental violence in the name of religion. Religious violence is not merely driven by fear, greed, revenge, or strategic compliance with those perpetrating the violence. The substance of religion can act as an independent variable that drives atrocities on its own, not an epiphenomenon masking real causes.

Second, Tezcür interrogates the common claim that mass publics are manipulated by ruling elites or rebel leaders seeking to advance worldly agendas through religious narratives. This mechanism can only work when these manipulative entrepreneurs “have good reason to believe that such discourses would find a receptive audience” (39). As Stuart Kaufman (Modern Hatreds, 2001) demonstrated in several cases of ethnic conflict in the post-Cold War Europe, preexisting ethnic myths and narratives provide the foundation upon which ethnic hatred can be constructed.

Third, Tezcür references experimental studies that demonstrate that individuals with strong religious beliefs or ones that have been exposed to scriptural justifications of violence are more likely to respond violently to religious outgroups that hold beliefs challenging the validity of their own. And religion contains within it the symbols, rituals, and transcendental rewards that could offer true believers the template and incentive to “defend” sacred values through acts of violence.

Yet, violence against liminal minorities is episodic. How could a constant factor of religious stigmatization only yield time-bound episodes of massacres against liminal minorities? Tezcür turns to his second variable, political resentment, to explain the timing of such atrocities. Religious stigmatization predisposes some believers to violence, but political resentment is the situational context that triggers violence. At its core, political resentment of liminal minorities emerges “when a group perceives that another group occupies a relatively higher but undeserved status in the political hierarchy” (61). The political resentment argument echoes the work of Roger Petersen (Understanding Ethnic Violence, 2002), who argues that ethnic violence often emerges from disruptions to established status hierarchies, when dominant groups are suddenly subordinated or subordinate groups unexpectedly rise in status. In these contexts, resentment becomes a particularly powerful driver of exterminationist violence, and it is particularly useful to explain bottom-up or neighbor-on-neighbor attacks.

Tezcür demonstrates these arguments by looking at case studies of Yezidis in Iraq and Alevis in Turkey. Both are liminal minorities that have been historically constructed as heretical communities that are undeserving of recognition, respect, and equal treatment. And both faced episodes of mass atrocities in the modern era. Tezcür also offers vignettes on other liminal minorities and some large-n analysis to supplement his main ethnographic research on Yezidis and Alevis. The fieldwork makes this book a particularly worthy read.

In both cases, Tezcür offers an insightful narrative of how the liminality of Yezidis and Alevis came about, how their diminished social status contributed to episodes of mass violence against their communities historically, and how relative improvements in their status under modernizing secular regimes (or, in the case of Yezidis, greater recognition by the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq) set the stage for political resentment that translated into mass atrocities in recent years.

Tezcür does a compelling job to demonstrate that violence was not just driven by outsiders looking to fan the flames of discord; local communities and neighbors participated in the bloodletting. Some repeated (sometimes chanted) historical slogans and blood libel-like narratives about the immorality and demonic nature of their victims. Just as importantly, Tezcür looks for alternative explanations for his theory and does not find the attackers to be driven by greed (loot), fear (imminent religious threat), revenge (Alevis and Yezidis were not part of the dominant repressive class), or simply following orders out of fear of being killed by armed groups. Compliance was voluntary, not coerced.

Liminal Minorities is an important and timely contribution and a much needed corrective on the curious neglect of religious beliefs as a direct causal mechanism of violence. Critical readers, however, may have some questions and critiques for the author to consider. First, why does the argument of religious stigmatization and political resentment stop at liminal minorities? After all, we have seen mass atrocities against majoritarian communities based precisely on these two variables in Iraq. Sunni rebels—particularly those who fall into the category of sectarian jihadists, of which the Islamic State (ISIS) is the most notable one—have targeted the majority Shia population because of their presumed heresies and their status reversal as rulers of Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority. It should also be said that ISIS in Iraq and Syria targeted Sunni Kurds, Sunni rebels, Sunni tribes, and Sunni clerics and political leaders. Not to mention killing People of the Book (Christians and Jews) in Europe and around the globe. In many ways, they were—and continue to be—equal opportunity extremists. Would not their extremism be the most direct causal variable for their violence against Yezidis, not the liminal minority status of that sect? While ISIS systematically permitted the rape of Yezidi women and girls—a practice not extended to other targeted groups—the violence inflicted upon Yezidis otherwise shared similar characteristics with the brutality experienced by other persecuted communities in Iraq.

Similarly, concerning attacks on Ahmadis in Pakistan, here, too, we find that those who attack this liminal minority are part of the broader Sunni-extremist networks that attack en masse Shia (e.g., Hazara Shia in Baluchistan), Sufis (e.g., Data Darbar shrine attack in Lahore, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine attack in Sehwan, and the Shah Noorani shrine attack in Baluchistan), Christians (e.g., Saints Church bombing in 2013 and the Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park attack during Easter celebrations in 2016), and Sunni intellectuals, politicians, and military personnel. Violence against Ahmadis is part and parcel of widespread religious extremism, not just directed at liminal minorities.

Second, Tezcür Liminal Minorities implicitly reprises the “ancient hatreds” theory of ethnic conflict, where primordial identities and ascriptive markers of ethnicity are treated as natural dividing lines between communities, resulting in boundary impermeability and irrational fears that recurringly descend into communal violence (see Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, 1993). Tezcür extends this ethnic-based logic to religious identities, insisting that “differences informed by religious liminality are less malleable … Consequently, the past has a long shadow that informs intergroup relations” (15). Given the clear parallels, Tezcür misses an opportunity to address the many criticisms of the “ancient hatreds” theory concerning essentialism; the fluidity of identity under conditions of nationalism, urbanization, and modernization; and the role of state policies and civil conflict in activating polarized identities.

Finally, Tezcür’s Liminal Minorities misclassifies state capacity as merely an “enabling factor” (12) in mass atrocities, which understates its critical importance. In reality, the state is the decisive variable in violent outbreaks. A strong state can either deploy its monopoly on military power to perpetrate genocidal violence against minorities or use that same power to prevent such violence. Conversely, a weak state cannot control armed groups engaging in predatory behavior. The translation of religious stigmatization and political resentment into actual violence directly depends on state security capacity. The state fundamentally determines whether violence occurs, functioning as either the primary enabler or constrainer. In essence, state capacity is the central factor determining whether liminal minorities can live peacefully or face violence.

Despite these criticisms, Tezcür’s work remains a valuable, timely, and meticulously researched contribution that provokes important theoretical discussions. Students at both undergraduate and graduate levels studying civil conflict or religious studies will find significant insights in engaging with his theory, particularly in how it effectively challenges instrumentalist explanations of violence.