Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia Free

The dramatic rise in religious violence across the globe since the end of the Cold War has motivated scholars to try to explain violent religion-related extremism. Much of the attention to religious violence in the modern world focuses on Islam. Of the world's major faith traditions, Buddhism is most commonly and widely associated with peace, tolerance, and compassion. Yet Buddhism, like every other great religion, has a violent side. While scholars acknowledge violence within Buddhism, few have explored why Buddhism becomes violent in some places but not others. We develop a structural explanation for Buddhist violence. Our central claim is that Buddhist violence tends to occur in countries where Buddhism and the state are closely intertwined. We test this theory using both a statistical analysis of Buddhist violence in Buddhist-majority and Buddhist-plural countries and case studies of Buddhist violence (or lack thereof) in Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Our findings show that religion-state integration emboldens Buddhist vigilantes to attack religious minorities. Our analysis suggests that states can take specific actions to mitigate the risk of violent religious extremism.

Recent events testify to the ongoing relevance of faith-based violence in the modern world. A new wave of religious violence across the Middle East commenced with the breathtaking attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023. Sectarian religion-related conflict simmers in countries as diverse as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Vietnam. A rising tide of hate crimes against Jews and Muslims throughout the United States and Europe demonstrates that religious violence also occurs outside the developing world.¹ According to the Pew Research Center, about one-quarter of countries in the world exhibit “high” or “very high” social hostilities involving religion, including violent religion-related attacks.² As of 2025, possible genocides against communities of faith are being carried out in China and in Myanmar. A stunning increase in religious violence has been an important part of a general global religious resurgence.³

The dramatic rise in religious violence since the end of the Cold War has spawned a cottage industry of scholarship, popular books, punditry, and policy analysis that attempts to explain, prevent, or combat violent religion-related extremism. Much of the attention to religious violence in the modern world has focused on Islam,⁴ but many scholars are also turning their focus to violence in Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism.⁵

Yet violence in one of the world's major religious traditions—Buddhism—has received far less attention. Of the world's major faith traditions, Buddhism is the one most commonly associated with peace, tolerance, and compassion, nonviolence being one of its most defining features. This view makes it a seemingly difficult case for any theory of religion and violence.⁶ Yet like every other major religious tradition, Buddhism has a violent side that belies the stereotype of it being an “exclusively pacifist” and “irenic” religion.⁷ The stereotype of Buddhism as uniquely committed to nonviolence exudes a type of “positive Orientialism,” which assumes that a non-Western religion should be more committed than Western Christianity to its original nonviolent teachings.⁸

Such a view also belies the historical reality of violence within Buddhism. As Ian Harris notes, “Any presentation of Buddhism as a tradition that focuses on its quietist, meditation-orientated dimension alone will necessarily be one-sided.”⁹ Consider several historical examples. Buddhist soldiers in sixth-century China achieved the noble “status of bodhisattva” for killing their enemies. In feudal Japan, warrior Buddhist monks known as the Sohei used force to defend territory and fight against those associated with rival schools of Buddhism. In sixteenth-century Thailand, Buddhist holy men staged bloody revolts against the government.¹⁰ During World War II, Zen Buddhism provided a strong foundation for Japanese militarism, including Imperial Japan's use of suicide warfare.¹¹

More recently, Buddhist actors have justified and carried out violence, especially in the Buddhist-majority states of South and Southeast Asia, where distinctively Buddhist forms of violent nationalism have collided with minority faith traditions.¹² One of the most serious acts of terrorism in the modern world involved a deadly chemical weapons attack in 1995 on the Tokyo subway system, carried out by a Japanese doomsday cult with roots in Buddhism called Aum Shinrikyo. During the political unrest that gripped Tibet in 2008, hundreds of Buddhist monks participated in riots that killed dozens of people. Buddhist violence figured prominently in a decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka, and it plays a crucial role in an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar and in simmering conflicts in other parts of Asia.¹³ Since the turn of the century, Buddhist violence has occurred in eight of eleven countries where Buddhists make up the largest religious group, including large-scale violent persecutions of minorities. Militant Buddhists have also supported violence in countries where Buddhists are not the majority. For example, in 2022, the head of the largest Buddhist denomination in Russia voiced support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.¹⁴

Although scholars such as Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Stanley Tambiah acknowledge Buddhist violence in their work, little scholarship has attempted to put forth generalizable and testable propositions for why Buddhism turns violent in some countries but not in others. Drawing on religious market theory, we propose as the simplest and most comprehensive explanation an institutional account of Buddhist violence, in particular the kind of relationship that governs how the temple and state interact in Buddhist-majority countries.¹⁵ Essentially, Buddhist violence has stemmed from a political bargain between Buddhism and the state. Owing to Buddhism's ubiquitous social prestige in Buddhist-majority countries, some governments have sought to co-opt it for political gain. In return, Buddhist monks have increasingly looked to their governments to promote Buddhist values, maintain social order, and perpetuate the purity and legitimacy of the Buddhist state.¹⁶ The mutually reinforcing relationship between temple and state means that Buddhism has become complicit in the violence of the state and the state in the violence that radical Buddhists have carried out.

We test this theory using a mixed-methodological design. The first part of the study conducts a statistical analysis of a unique dataset consisting of identifiable cases of Buddhist violence in Asia. The second part examines case studies of Buddhist violence in three countries—Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand—showing how increasing entanglement between religious and state institutions has created a fertile breeding ground for majoritarian violence. We also include the negative case of Singapore, a country that demonstrates how the separation of religion and state has created conditions conducive to peace. Combined, both analyses provide robust support for our theory.

The study carries broader implications for the study of religious violence beyond Buddhism. The structural argument that religion-state arrangements and not merely theological beliefs—politics not just religion—spawn religious violence suggests that the same explanation for faith-based violence can be applied to the world's other faith traditions, including Islam. The structural theory of Buddhist violence presented here also has implications for policy. It suggests that states can take specific actions to mitigate the risk of violent religious extremism.

This article proceeds in six parts. The first section examines the literature on Buddhist violence, noting the dearth of generalizable theories accounting for why Buddhism is prone to violence or peace across different settings. The second section develops a theory of Buddhist violence grounded in religious market theory. The third and fourth sections describe the data and methods used in the statistical analysis and present the results. The fifth section features brief case studies of different countries, illustrating how entanglement between temple and state has produced Buddhist violence or how its absence has helped keep violence at bay. This section also briefly discusses alternative explanations for Buddhist violence. The conclusion highlights the central paradox of this article: The religion most well known for its commitment to nonviolence can become violent when it occupies a privileged position in the state relative to other religions.

In the study of religious violence, Islam has captured the lion's share of scholarly attention. In recent years, however, scholars have increasingly paid attention to violence in what is arguably the religion most known for its pacifism: Buddhism. This work explores Buddhist violence in historical perspective, contemporary cases of Buddhist violence, and the religious foundations for Buddhist violence. This section briefly summarizes this literature.

Some work examines Buddhist violence in historical perspective. This scholarship explores how Buddhist leaders and a variety of Buddhist traditions have sanctioned violence against their enemies across time. Jacob Dalton explores mythic and ritualistic themes of violence and blood sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism, beginning with the Tibetan “age of fragmentation” in the ninth century.¹⁷ Michael Como investigates violence in Japan's Buddhist Prince Shotoku cult during the Asuka and Nara periods.¹⁸ Jerryson and Juergensmeyer explore the history of Buddhist violence in diverse settings across time, including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tibet.¹⁹

Other work examines recent or contemporary cases of Buddhist violence. Much of this scholarship focuses on specific countries. Tambiah shows how Buddhism became embroiled in the bloody twenty-six-year civil war in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese Buddhists and a militant Hindu Tamil group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers.²⁰ In Mahinda Deegalle's edited volume, authors acknowledge Buddhism's role in the Sri Lankan conflict, but they also argue that Buddhism's unique spiritual resources could help bring the war to its end.²¹ John Clifford Holt examines the reasons for the rise of contemporary violent Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka.²² Jerryson charts how Thai Buddhist monasteries have transformed from intercommunal spaces into fortresses for the Thai armed forces. He also discusses the rise of “soldier monks” who fight on behalf of the Thai state in its struggle against Muslim secessionists in the overwhelmingly Muslim and ethnically Malay southern part of the country known as the “Deep South.”²³ Francis Wade explores how Myanmar's political leaders have manipulated and mobilized Buddhist identity to lay the foundations for mass violence.²⁴ Matt Schissler, Matthew Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi show how a ubiquitous narrative among Buddhist communities that presents Muslims in Myanmar as an existential threat to “race and religion” and a personal threat to individuals and communities provides a pretext for anti-Muslim discrimination and violence.²⁵ Melissa Crouch similarly explores Muslim marginalization in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.²⁶ In 2017, the Journal of Contemporary Asia devoted an entire special issue to interpreting communal violence in Myanmar.²⁷ Some work seeks to compare militant Buddhist movements in different countries.²⁸

A third line of work examines the basis for violence in Buddhist thought, doctrine, and actions. Jerryson explores how Buddhists invoke, support, or justify war, conflict, state violence, and gender discrimination.²⁹ Deegalle examines justifications for violence specifically in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.³⁰ Similarly, Jerryson scrutinizes the scriptural justifications, symbols, and manifestations of violence in each of Buddhism's major branches: Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana.³¹ Charles Keyes shows how the forces of modernity contributed to the rise of Buddhist nationalism and militancy and transformed Theravada thought.³² Leesa Davis, by contrast, focuses on the justification for violence in Mahayana Buddhism.³³ Rupert Gethin explores early Buddhist attitudes toward violence and the basis for violence in Buddhism.³⁴ Iselin Frydenlund focuses on the importance of ritual in generating Buddhist violence.³⁵

All these studies make important contributions to the study of comparative religious violence, revealing that scholars can no longer afford to focus exclusively on the monotheistic faith traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in their quest to understand faith-based conflict in the modern world. Even the world's supposedly nonviolent religious traditions are susceptible to violent tendencies. Buddhism, like every other religion, reflects the nature of humanity, at times even its basest instincts. By and large, though, these studies tend to be descriptive, usually focusing on developments within a single country. Yet as Hannah Gould and Melyn McKay note, “Understanding the ways in which select groups of Buddhists arrive at a moral justification for the mistreatment of minority communities is essential to addressing the structural violence which such communities are subject.”³⁶ Thus, a major gap remains in our understanding of Buddhist violence across countries. Are there any recurring features in countries where Buddhist violence breaks out? The following section theorizes that there are. It proposes an explanation for Buddhist violence rooted in politics. Specifically, it argues that the intertwining of Buddhism, the state, and national identity has been largely responsible for producing Buddhist violence in the modern world.

Scholars of global religion have long recognized a striking paradox: Faiths that proclaim a message of peace and love can also become implicated in the murder of innocent civilians. They label this contradiction “the ambivalence of the sacred.”³⁷ To say that religion is politically ambivalent means that it is fundamentally malleable and can be used to support myriad political positions—even contradictory ones like violence and peace.³⁸ Although scholars acknowledge the ambivalent nature of religion, less understood is why religion is sometimes prone to violence and at other times prone to peace.³⁹ For any religion to become embroiled in violence, latent spiritual views must somehow become politically activated. What kinds of environments encourage or discourage religious violence?

Of particular importance is how religious and political institutions interact. In a pioneering work, Daniel Philpott argues that religious ideology interacts with governmental treatment of religion to produce religious violence in the forms of communal conflict and terrorism. His comparative analysis demonstrates that religious groups operating independently of the state and embracing a political theology aligned with tolerance and liberalism tend to advocate democracy, peace, and reconciliation. Conversely, those with close state ties and theologies that legitimize violence are more inclined to endorse authoritarianism and the use of force to achieve their objectives.⁴⁰ Following the trail blazed by Philpott, other scholars apply the idea of religion-state arrangements to the study of religious violence, including civil wars, terrorism, and mob violence.⁴¹

While there are multiple ways that government and religion can become entangled, arguably the most important entanglement is a religion-state arrangement sometimes dubbed “religious favoritism,” or state support for religion.⁴² Religious favoritism can be understood as an implicit bargain between historically and culturally dominant religious communities and political elites. Religious actors in these states pledge their allegiance to certain political leaders, believing “that these leaders will bring a greater sense of purity to the world and shield the social and political dominance of the majority religion against religious newcomers and other minorities.”⁴³ Globalization and international migration have greatly contributed to widespread fears among majoritarian religious communities that their countries are quickly losing their cultural heritage. Accordingly, majority religions seek to revive national myths steeped in religious identity as a way to demarcate national belonging.⁴⁴ For their part, political leaders have institutional incentives to favor majority faith traditions—doing so reinforces their rule and imbues their preferred policies with an aura of spiritual transcendence. These leaders may not be religious themselves, but they covet the benefits of allying with dominant religions.⁴⁵ Religious identity thus becomes weaponized from both sides to exclude nonprivileged individuals and communities from citizenship and political representation, and from having a role in determining public policy.⁴⁶

This dynamic exists in the Buddhist world. Muslims minorities, in particular, have suffered disproportionately from Buddhist nationalism. That Buddhist-majority countries have marginalized Muslims reflects not only local developments but global realities, including the proliferation of extremist Islamist movements and global Islamophobia.⁴⁷ Thus, the securitization of Islam has affected not only the Christian countries of the West but the Buddhist countries of the Far East.

Why does favoritism encourage religious violence? Essentially, religious favoritism intensifies the salience of religious contention within countries.⁴⁸ In settings marked by favoritism, political elites work hand in hand with religious leaders to stifle unacceptable religious views, coerce religious conformity, and weaken the forces of moderation.⁴⁹ Government support for a particular (again usually historically dominant) religious tradition and concurrent repression of minority and heterodox faith traditions radicalizes elements from within the majority group who consider government policies of favoritism as officially sanctioning their faith's own radical interpretations.⁵⁰ Paradoxically, it is those who identify with politically empowered religious groups who use their privileged stations to justify attacking out-groups, even as these groups attempt to portray themselves as victims of minority encroachment. Whereas religious violence is commonly believed to be a “weapon of the weak” carried out by aggrieved religious minorities, it is more often a “weapon of the strong” that politically and culturally empowered religious communities wield against those of minority faith traditions.⁵¹ This is not to suggest, of course, that disempowered religious minorities are not also violent.⁵² Our point is that majoritarian vigilantism represents a more prevalent and often overlooked form of violence in the modern world.⁵³ In Buddhist countries, the passage of anti-minority laws and policies—prohibiting proselytizing and conversion, restricting interreligious marriage, regulating religious dress, and forcing dead bodies to be cremated—has coincided with Buddhist attacks, particularly against Muslims.⁵⁴

Under conditions of religious favoritism, majoritarian violence occurs via three pathways. The first is known as religious “outbidding.”⁵⁵ Outbidding occurs in states where the regime derives its political authority from its commitment to upholding the hegemony of the dominant faith tradition in a country's laws and policies. Such regimes, though, are considered legitimate only when they retain their faith-based purity. If the state deviates from the acceptable path, ultra-conservative factions may question the regime's good faith.⁵⁶ As Jonathan Fox and Jori Breslawski explain, “state support for religion often results in state control over that religion, which may cause many believers to feel that the government-controlled version of their religion is inappropriate and unauthentic.”⁵⁷ In these kinds of environments, religious radicals may attempt to outbid the regime and rival religious groups in demonstrating the zealousness of their hatred for religious outsiders and the righteousness of their claims to be the true guardians of the authentic faith.

In a second pathway, official laws and policies that favor certain religious communities over others encourage majoritarian violence by signaling to vigilantes that they will not be held accountable for their actions. When states institutionalize religious favoritism, beneficiaries may reasonably conclude that the state condones discrimination, harassment, and even attacks against adherents of nonprivileged faiths.⁵⁸ Failing to arrest and prosecute perpetrators of violence contributes to a climate of impunity. Often, the state turns a blind eye when adherents of the dominant faith tradition carry out violence. According to one author, “religious vigilantes thus feel empowered to commit acts of violence with little or no fear of governmental reprisal.”⁵⁹ In short, government laws and policies endorse, enable, and excuse the violent activities of majoritarian militants.

Finally, religious privilege can convince members of the majority community that they have a sacred duty to repel religious outsiders in order to uphold the religious identity of the state. When historically dominant faith communities see themselves as the victims of encroachment by other faith traditions, extremists from the majority may believe that using force is necessary to save their countries from impending demise. Furthermore, because religion and the state are intertwined, the majority community believes that its divine duty is to inoculate the political apparatus against contaminating forces.

The flip side of this argument is that disentangled political systems tend to experience fewer problems with religious violence. A central characteristic of disentangled political arrangements, religious freedom, has the effect of depriving majoritarian religions of unbalanced state support, thus making violence less likely because extremists have little reason to think that the state will not punish their actions.⁶⁰ Such environments also inhibit radical theologies by encouraging debate about the use of violence in religion. In these contexts, extremists find their arguments critiqued in the marketplace of ideas, thus reducing the likelihood of individuals accepting the radical narrative. The need to put out a “good product” in these religious marketplaces makes religious groups less likely to turn to the gun, because doing so would repel existing members of that faith and deter potential converts.

The relationship between religious favoritism and religious violence is not always unidirectional; religious and state institutions interact in complex, ever-changing, and mutually reinforcing ways. Thus, it is possible that countries' religion-state arrangements might become more entangled in response to religious conflict.⁶¹ Majoritarian groups embroiled in conflict often look to the state for greater patronage, prompting governments to further express their support for the majority religion. For this reason, the relationship between religious favoritism and violent religious conflict is best understood as a dynamic, interactive, and ongoing cycle: Political elites favor a dominant religion out of perceived self-interest; that favoritism engenders religious conflict; favored religious groups look to the state for further support in the midst of conflict, and states often grant it as a means to shore up their own political fortunes. Although a spiral of favoritism and violence is common, the historical record shows that the various dynamics that engender religious conflict stem from an initial religion-state arrangement of favoritism. Governments might then base their justification for further favoritism on the realized threat of religious violence. In short, vigilante and government behaviors are often interdependent. Nevertheless, the state may not always support communal violence and may attempt to intervene in order to rein in violence that has spiraled out of control. In some cases, states have arrested key violence agitators and banned militant movements following waves of violence.

Importantly, this perspective on religious violence does not single out any particular faith tradition or religion more generally as being inherently prone to violence. Rather, it suggests that religious violence is the result of political arrangements rather than certain faith beliefs. In theory, this means that any religious tradition—including the supposedly pacifist religion of Buddhism—can become violent under the right circumstances. Of course, one could argue that any religion that is prone to insist on strong links to the state will, as a consequence, also be more likely to see violence as acceptable—an argument that has often been applied to Islam.⁶² At the same time, there is little reason to think that Buddhism would not also be susceptible to the temptation of religious favoritism, as are the other religions of the world, and that violence within Buddhism would not arise for similar reasons.⁶³

This theoretical framework recognizes that other factors help produce Buddhist violence. Scholars of religion and violence show how religiously motivated violence is a multidimensional phenomenon rooted in myriad historical, ideological, sociopolitical, and psychological factors.⁶⁴ Still, we believe that there are discernible patterns to this violence. Our theory proposes a structural explanation for such violence; it posits that religious favoritism is a primary cause of majoritarian violence in Buddhist-majority countries.

To test the hypothesis that state favoritism of Buddhism is associated with higher levels of Buddhist violence, we use a novel longitudinal dataset consisting of the world's eleven Buddhist-majority (where the majority of people in the state practice Buddhism) or Buddhist-plural (where Buddhism is the largest religion but not large enough to constitute the majority) countries from 2007 to 2018, the period for which data are available.⁶⁵ The dataset thus includes the universe of cases. The time-series, cross-national data allow us to assess variations in state policies across countries and over time. The country-year is the unit of observation. Given that the outcome variable is a count of violence cases and cannot take on negative values, and given the irregular distribution across observations, negative binomial regression is the most appropriate statistical technique to model the data. The models also include robust standard errors clustered on countries to account for within-country correlation of observations.

The dependent variable is the number of identifiable violent attacks that Buddhists or Buddhist groups conducted against non-Buddhists in a given country-year (Buddhist_Attacks). In our sample, the dependent variable ranges from 0 to 37. The data and coding for the variable are from the Global Terrorism Database, an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world.⁶⁶

Our independent variable is a measure of the level of state favoritism of Buddhism in a given country-year (Buddhist_Favoritism). This variable, derived from Pew Research Center's annual reports on global religious freedom, is a sum of eight components of favoritism, each of which captures a different aspect of favoritism.⁶⁷ Together, these components provide a comprehensive picture of religious favoritism in a given country. The components are as follows: (1) the country's constitution recognizes Buddhism as a favored religion; (2) Buddhism has privileges or government access unavailable to other religious groups; (3) the government provides funds or other resources to Buddhism with obvious favoritism; (4) the government provides funds or other resources for Buddhist religious education programs or religious schools with obvious favoritism; (5) the government provides funds or other resources for Buddhist religious property with obvious favoritism; (6) the government provides funds or other resources for Buddhist religious activities other than education or property with obvious favoritism; (7) Buddhist religious education is required in public schools; (8) the national government defers in some way to Buddhist religious authorities, texts, or doctrines on legal issues.

Each of these dimensions of favoritism carries a maximum value of 1, as defined by Pew coding. Thus, the complete scale ranges from 0 to 8, with a higher score indicating greater religious favoritism. As the literature shows, higher levels of religious favoritism and restrictions on religious minorities often go hand in hand.⁶⁸

Many other variables may also influence the number of Buddhist violent attacks beyond the independent variable of interest. Hence, we control for various covariates that the literature identifies as being related to the onset of societal violence. First, we include four key political variables that might be associated with Buddhist attacks: political rights (Political_Rights), civil liberties (Civil_Liberties), procedural democracy (Polity), and regime durability (Durability). We source from Freedom House the variables Political_Rights and Civil_Liberties, which measure the extent to which governments repress both political and civil rights.⁶⁹ Both variables range from 1 to 7, with higher scores denoting greater levels of repression. We include these variables to account for the finding that repression produces mass grievances and increases the likelihood of violence in society.⁷⁰ Whereas Political_Rights and Civil_Liberties capture a country's commitments to individual freedom, Polity measures a country's level of institutional democracy. The Polity scale runs from 210 to 110, with higher scores indicating a greater level of procedural democracy. We expect a country's Polity score to be inversely related to violent religious hostilities.⁷¹Durability calculates the number of years since a country's last change in regime type. Following the literature, we expect violent religious hostilities to emerge less often in more stable regime types.⁷² The data for Polity and Durability are from the Polity5 dataset.⁷³

In addition to controlling for political variables, we also control for economic and demographic factors that may play a role in producing violent religious hostilities: the logged values of a country's geographical area (Area _Logged), population (Population_Logged), and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (GDPcapita_Logged).⁷⁴ These variables control for the possible impacts that poverty, large territories, and large populations may have on fanning religious conflict. Following the literature, we expect wealthy countries, geographically large countries, and countries with smaller populations to be less likely than their poorer, geographically smaller, and more populous counterparts to experience violent religious hostilities.⁷⁵ These variables are from the World Bank's World Development Indicators.⁷⁶

Finally, we also control for religion-specific demographic variables that might affect our dependent variable. We include covariates for the number of religious groups in a country consisting of more than 5 percent of the population (Religious_Groups) and the number of religious minority groups in a country (Religious_Minorities). We include these variables to test the hypothesis that countries with more religious groups and associated social divisions experience greater violent religious hostilities.⁷⁷ Both variables are from the Religion and State Project.⁷⁸Table 1 presents the summary statistics.

Our main models contain five different specifications. Each model includes different control variables but the same outcome variable, Buddhist_Attacks, and the same independent variable, Buddhist_Favoritism. The first model specification controls for only political variables: Political_Rights, Civil_Liberties, Polity, and Durability. The second model specification additionally holds constant the economic and demographic variables, Area_Logged, Population_Logged and GDPcapita_Logged. The third model specification controls for the political covariates and the religious covariates, Religious_Groups and Religious _Minorities. The fourth model specification controls for demographic, economic, and religious variables. The fifth model specification includes all the covariates. Table 2 presents the results of the main model tests.

The results, from all model specifications, support our theory that state favoritism of Buddhism is positively associated with higher levels of Buddhist violence. Model 5 holds statistical significance at the 1 percent level; models 1, 2, and 4 hold significance at the 5 percent level; and model 3 holds significance at the 10 percent level. Among the covariates, Religious_Groups and Religious_Minorities are statistically significant in all the model specifications in which they are included (models 3, 4, and 5). Among the political controls, Political_Rights is statistically significant in three of the four model specifications in which it is included (models 1, 2, and 3). Likewise, both Population _Logged and GDPcapita_Logged are statistically significant in two of the three model specifications in which they are included (models 2 and 5). To better understand the results, we estimate and interpret the substantive effects of state favoritism for Buddhism on Buddhist violent attacks against other groups. The incidence rate ratios in table 3 report the rate at which events are likely to occur. Across all model specifications, the incident rate ratio ranges from 1.31 to 1.56, indicating that a one-unit increase in the Buddhist favoritism scale corresponds to a 31–56 percent increase in Buddhist violence. The results are statistically significant across all model specifications, providing quantitative evidence in support of our theory.⁷⁹

This section presents brief case studies of religious favoritism and Buddhist violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand—the three countries where Buddhist vigilantes have carried out the most attacks in the twenty-first century. While the quantitative analysis shows that increases in Buddhist privilege correspond to higher levels of Buddhist violence, these cases aim to show how privilege has emboldened Buddhist vigilantes across cases. They demonstrate the relationship between deepening entanglement between Buddhism and the state and Buddhist extremism. The method conforms to John Stuart Mill's “method of agreement,” whereby cases feature different background conditions—economics, histories, politics—but similar values for the independent variable.⁸⁰ If the theory is correct, the values of the independent and dependent variables should covary over time. The method of agreement helps isolate the cause of the outcome variable, in that this variable would be unlikely to arise in the absence of the independent variable. The qualitative methodology used here illustrates the central argument of this article: Favoritism of Buddhism has encouraged Buddhist extremists to carry out attacks against minorities. In all three cases, the state favors Buddhism. This favoritism becomes weaponized against religious outsiders, especially Muslims. Buddhist vigilantes identify the major threat to their political and cultural hegemony as arising from such religious out-groups.

To increase confidence in the theory, we include a negative case—Singapore—where Buddhist violence has not materialized. Unlike in the positive cases, in Singapore, religious favoritism does not exist and, consequently, Buddhist radicalization has not occurred. Together, the positive and negative cases provide a strong test of the theory and achieve greater leverage for causal analysis,⁸¹ while also avoiding the pitfall of selecting on the depend-ent variable.

After Myanmar (then Burma) gained independence from Great Britain in 1948, successive governments partnered with the sangha (monkhood) to bolster their legitimacy. Political leaders, hoping to cloak themselves in an aura of spiritual transcendence, have publicly participated in Buddhist rites and affirmed the dominant status of Buddhism in Burmese society. Every regime since the country's independence has either endorsed Buddhism as the state religion or adopted Buddhist values to build political legitimacy. Article 361 of the country's 2008 constitution recognizes the “special position of Buddhism as the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens of the Union.”⁸² A Ministry of Religious Affairs exists to purify, perpetuate, promote, and propagate “the Theravada Buddhist [religion].”⁸³ Myanmar's military regime has forcibly assimilated minorities into the predominant Burmese Buddhist culture. Although the Burmese military has cracked down on Buddhism when it deems that doing so is necessary, it has also co-opted Buddhism when possible. In turn, the sangha lends the state a certain spiritual authority to shape the country's policy.

Although the sangha and the state have generally cooperated in post-independence Myanmar, Buddhist violence has increased as the relationship has become more entangled. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Buddhism and the state were less integrated, Buddhist violence in Myanmar occurred sporadically. But Buddhist violence intensified as the sangha and the government moved closer together and the state began to crack down on minorities, particularly Muslims; nationalist monks often spurred acts of violence. In 1994, a militant monk named U Thuzana founded the oldest Buddhist militant organization in Myanmar, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA). The DKBA received financial and military assistance from the government in exchange for its assistance in offensives against the Christian-led Karen National Liberation Army.⁸⁴

Some of the deadliest violence occurred in 1997, when bloody riots broke out in Mandalay. A mob of at least 1,000 Buddhist monks waged a campaign of targeted violence against Muslims. The monks burned religious books, physically assaulted Muslims, and vandalized Muslim-owned establishments. The military junta that ruled Myanmar turned a blind eye to the ransacked mosques and attacked Muslim homes and businesses. The riot followed a violent government campaign known as Pyi Thaya against the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority living in the western part of the country.

Following a hike in oil and gas prices, in 2008 many monks participated in massive demonstrations against the military junta that collectively came to be known as the “Saffron Revolution.” After showing some initial restraint, the regime eventually cracked down on the protestors, including the remonstrating elements within the sangha, when they began to agitate for democracy. As images of the brutal crackdown circulated across Myanmar despite an internet shutdown, the junta sought to repair cordial relations with the sangha in order to regain its legitimacy.⁸⁵ As the sangha became estranged from the state, Buddhist violence sharply declined; few incidents of identifiable majority-on-minority violence occurred during this time.

Yet Buddhism became more integrated with the state in the 2010s, when President U Thein Sein supported a national law prohibiting interfaith marriage known as “Safeguarding the National Identity,” a measure that nationalist monks promoted to prevent Buddhist women from marrying Muslim men as a way to “preserve race and religion.”⁸⁶ In 2012, thousands of monks marched in support of the president's proposal to forcibly remove Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. In 2015, militant monks campaigned on behalf of the political party representing the military junta. These monks have fostered a widespread belief among Burmese Buddhists that Muslims living in Myanmar seek to undermine the country's Theravada Buddhist identity.⁸⁷ They believe that they have a sacred duty to purify the country of contaminating religious forces.

The formation of contemporary militant Buddhist nationalist movement in Myanmar coincided with the tightening entanglement between Buddhism and the state. This movement has encompassed two organizations: the 969 Movement, formed in 2012 and headed by a militant monk, Ashin Wirathu, whom Time Magazine dubbed the “Burmese Bin Laden” and the “face of Buddhist terror”; and the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion, MaBaTha (later rebranded as the Buddha Dhamma Parahita Foundation), which formed in 2013.⁸⁸ Both groups orchestrated campaigns of discrimination and violence against Myanmar's minorities.⁸⁹ In 2023, the country's military ruler, General Min Aung Hlaing, awarded Wirathu with the honorific “Thiri Pyanchi” title for his “outstanding work for the good of the Union of Myanmar.”⁹⁰

The government's targeting of the Rohingya, especially through the military known as the Tatmadaw, has prompted Buddhist vigilantes to do the same.⁹¹ The state's actions have effectively condoned Buddhist vigilantes' attacks against minorities. The Myanmar government and the country's Buddhist nationalists have long portrayed the Rohingya as illegal aliens who migrated from Bangladesh, even though a majority of Rohingya claim to have lived in Myanmar for generations. Nevertheless, the government refuses to recognize the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group and denies them citizenship, making the Rohingya one of the largest stateless populations in the world.⁹² They do not have property rights, equal protection under the law, or access to health care and education.⁹³

Since the 1990s, the Rohingya have suffered accelerating waves of violence, and Rohingya refugees have been fleeing the country at a staggering rate.⁹⁴ Buddhist extremists' anti-Rohingya violence has largely tracked the level of religion-state entanglement. In May 2012, anti-Rohingya violence engulfed the northern part of Rakhine State and the state capital, Sittwe, as well as surrounding areas after a group of Muslim men allegedly raped and murdered a Buddhist woman. Violence against the Rohingya quickly spread to other parts of the country, including Mandalay and Meiktila. The following month, a Buddhist mob lynched ten Muslims in central Myanmar. The violence continued for months; Buddhists killed hundreds of Rohingya, destroyed more than a dozen holy sites and thousands of Muslim homes, and displaced over 100,000 people.⁹⁵ Human Rights Watch documented collusion among state authorities, militant monks, and community leaders.⁹⁶ Although the government declared a state of emergency and deployed troops to restore calm, Muslims, particularly in Rakhine State, continued to be killed, injured, or displaced at alarming rates. The overwhelming majority of those who perpetrated the violence have never been brought to justice.

Over one million Rohingya have fled Myanmar since the 1990s, including many women and children who have settled in the world's largest and most densely populated refugee camps, located in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh.⁹⁷ Many Rohingya who remain in Myanmar are internally displaced or held in internment camps. The United Nations has described the Rohingya as the most persecuted minority in the world.⁹⁸ Scholars and human rights practitioners have depicted the situation as a genocide.⁹⁹ Former United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, referred to the situation as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”¹⁰⁰ As of 2025, a case regarding Myanmar's violations of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) is pending at the International Court of Justice.

In the earliest years of Sri Lanka's (then Ceylon's) independence from Great Britain, the state pursued polices that recognized and protected the country's ethnic and religious diversity. Shortly thereafter, however, the sangha demanded that the state protect and privilege Buddhism and worked to bridge Buddhism and the state. In 1951, the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress presented a resolution to the prime minister informing him that he was “legally and morally bound to protect and maintain Buddhism and Buddhist institutions” and advising him to raise Buddhism to the “paramount position of prestige which rightfully belongs to it.”¹⁰¹ The congress was concerned that minority Tamils and Western colonial powers had weakened Buddhism, as it argued in its report titled The Betrayal of Buddhism.¹⁰²

During the 1956 general election, the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (comprised mainly of Sinhalese Buddhists) promised the Buddhist majority a privileged status in the country's civic and political life in exchange for its backing of the sangha. After the Sri Lankan Freedom Party's leader, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, won the election and became the prime minister, monks began to influence state policies. Non-Buddhists, on the other hand, were relegated to the status of second-class citizens.¹⁰³ In line with the outbidding pathway discussed earlier, an extremist Buddhist monk assassinated Bandaranaike in 1959 when he failed to sufficiently fulfill his “Sinhala only” campaign pledge.

Beginning in the 1960s, religious and ethnic identity became interwoven: To be Buddhist was to be Sinhalese and vice versa. Successive governments after the Bandaranaike administration sought to implement a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist agenda. In 1965, the government abrogated an agreement that would have allowed for greater Tamil regional autonomy. In 1972, the government rewrote the country's constitution to give an official privileged status to Buddhism. Although it did not declare the country to be a Buddhist state, Article 9 of the second chapter gave Buddhism “the foremost place” and mandated that the state “protect and foster” the Buddhist religion.¹⁰⁴ The alliance between Buddhism and the state views Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese Buddhist country rather than a multireligious or multiethnic one. Consequently, the alliance threatens to destroy religious pluralism and any shared sense of belonging. As Heather Selma Gregg notes, “Modern-day Sinhalese nationalism” is “rooted in local myths of being a religiously chosen people and of special progeny.”¹⁰⁵

In 1977 and 1981, the intertwining of Buddhism and the state gave rise to anti-Tamil riots that killed hundreds and internally displaced thousands of Tamils and destroyed their sacred sites. From 1983 to 2009, the militant Tamil Tigers separatist group and the Sinhalese government fought a bloody civil war. The Sinhalese Buddhist state brutally repressed the Tamils and enacted an anti-Tamil pogrom, prompting the (primarily Hindu) Tamil Tigers to fight to create an independent state in the northeastern part of the country called Eelam. More than 800,000 Tamils fled the country, and over 100,000 civilians perished during the conflict. The war ended in 2009 when the Sri Lankan armed forces finally triumphed over the Tamil Tigers.

Although numerous factors contributed to the war, among the most prominent was the political co-optation of Buddhism. The monks provided the spiritual justification for state violence, which enabled this co-optation.¹⁰⁶ In the midst of the war, militant Buddhist monks founded the Movement for the Protection of the Motherland (MSV), an organization that sought to maintain Sinhalese Buddhist sovereignty over the country.¹⁰⁷ Not only did Buddhist nationalists help escalate the conflict, they also repeatedly resisted ceasefire agreements and peace initiatives that could have potentially ameliorated tensions.¹⁰⁸

When Sri Lanka's twenty-six-year civil war ended in 2009, many were optimistic that the country would reestablish relatively amicable relations among Sri Lanka's various religious and ethnic communities. Religious freedom, including for minorities, appeared to be expanding and Buddhist privilege declining. In 2010, episodes of communal violence reached their lowest point since the civil war began. Though tensions remained high, the country remained relatively peaceful until 2013, when a renewed Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, bolstered by a political elite that feared alienating the Buddhist majority, began to take root.¹⁰⁹ Neil DeVotta contends that the island state has since consolidated its status as a Sinhalese Buddhist “ethnocracy,” wherein Buddhist extremists quickly looked for and found a new enemy: Muslims.¹¹⁰

As Buddhist privilege has increased, so too has Buddhist violence. Buddhist nationalism has resurged in Sri Lanka, and communal conflict has shifted from being ethno-religious to more straightforwardly religious. Part and parcel of this shift has been radical Buddhist groups' and individuals' increasing hatred toward and mobilization against the Muslim minority.¹¹¹ For decades, the ethno-religious civil war between Sinhala Buddhists and Hindu Tamils had far eclipsed periodic tensions between Buddhists and Sri Lankan Muslims, who constitute about 10 percent of Sri Lanka's population of 21 million. Muslims remained largely neutral during the war.¹¹² Sri Lanka's growing Muslim population and increasing economic competition over resources have contributed to the recent and spreading animosity toward Muslims, which also coincides with an increasingly autocratic regime in Colombo.¹¹³

Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalists believe that the shifting religious landscape threatens the country's Buddhist character. Led by activist monks who promote an extreme form of Buddhist nationalism, some groups (e.g., Bodu Bala Sena, Sinhala Ravana, and Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa) have worked on the ground and online to restrict the activities of Sri Lanka's religious minority communities.¹¹⁴ For example, they have advocated prohibiting Muslim women from wearing veils in public, abolishing halal certification and slaughtering cattle, restricting mosque construction, boycotting Muslim-owned businesses, and regulating both business and personal travel to the Middle East. These groups have disseminated Islamophobic conspiracy theories—including that Muslim-owned businesses secretly distributed products to sterilize Sinhalese Buddhist women and that Muslims were deliberately spreading COVID-19. They have also distributed leaflets and organized rallies and protests to foster a climate of paranoia over Muslims among Buddhist communities.¹¹⁵

Militant Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka has accompanied a renewed alliance between the sangha and the state. Bodu Bala Sena developed close links to the postwar government of Mahinda Rajapaksa.¹¹⁶ In 2013, Rajapaksa was a guest of honor at the opening ceremony for a Bodu Bala Sena training center.¹¹⁷ The Rajapaksa government donated valuable land in Colombo to construct a Buddhist cultural center. The state has also implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) supported extremist groups' anti-minority rallies, sometimes tolerating violence against disfavored out-groups. As A. R. M. Imtiyaz and Amjad Mohamed-Saleem note, “There is recognized sympathy among the government coalition members … for the [Bodu Bala Sena] campaign.”¹¹⁸ In short, Muslims have largely replaced Hindu Tamils as the Buddhist nationalist object of wrath in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's favoritism toward Buddhism has emboldened Buddhist extremists to carry out attacks against non-Buddhists. In 2011, Buddhist monks, reportedly colluding with local law enforcement, destroyed a 300-year-old Muslim shrine in Anuradhapura.¹¹⁹ In 2014, a mere five years after its devastating civil war ended, communal riots between Muslims and Buddhists displaced nearly 10,000 people. The riots followed a speech by the firebrand founder and secretary general of Bodu Bala Sena, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, at a rally in Aluthgama. Gnanasara declared, “This country still has a Sinhala police. A Sinhala army. If a single Sinhalese is touched, that will be the end of [all Muslims].”¹²⁰ Soon after the speech, hundreds of his supporters rampaged through a nearby Muslim neighborhood, setting fire to and destroying mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, and Muslim homes.¹²¹ Victims of violence accused the police of standing by or even assisting the rioters.¹²² The riot ended only after the military imposed a curfew, though many rioters were never charged for their actions.¹²³ The police eventually arrested Gnanasara for instigating anti-Muslim hate crimes, and the courts sentenced him to six years in prison. Gnanasara, however, received a presidential pardon following his supporters' intensive lobbying in support of the extremist monk.

Anti-Muslim violence only escalated after the Aluthgama riot. In 2017, extremist Buddhists, including many monks, attacked a group of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, forcing them to flee to a United Nations shelter in Colombo.¹²⁴ In 2018, riots in Ampara and Kandy descended into mob violence against Muslims, following the murder of a Sinhalese lorry driver.¹²⁵ In both the 2014 and 2018 riots, law enforcement failed to prosecute violent Buddhist nationalist groups. Although the government and Sinhalese Buddhist groups condemned the attacks, a number of politicians and extremist monks had discretely maintained close relations with leaders of the mobs. Some of the attackers, including several prominent Buddhist activists, were arrested but not convicted. Although the state deployed many police and security forces, they neither prevented the riots from taking place nor stopped them once in motion. The minister for justice, Rauff Hakeem, accused his own government of failing to protect vulnerable Muslim communities.¹²⁶

Riots are not the only form of anti-minority violence to have emerged in recent years. Hate crimes against Muslims have also increased since the end of the civil war. Buddhist extremists, exploiting long-simmering resentment among the dominant Sinhalese Buddhist majority, have regularly set fire to Muslim shops and homes. Social media has abetted much of the anti-Muslim violence that has gripped the island; allegations of Muslim wrongdoing proliferate online and vigilante groups have cohered in response.¹²⁷ Our analysis of violent religious hostilities in Sri Lanka from the end of the civil war through 2018 reveals that Buddhist extremists conducted at least seventy attacks against Muslims, including attacks on Muslim holy places. During that time, Muslims did not commit a single identifiable act of minority violence. The first major attack in Sri Lanka by Muslim extremists was the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which deepened the alliance between Buddhism and the state and prompted further anti-Muslim violence.

While Buddhism has long been a basis for Thai national identity and an instrument of state building, religious freedom and nondiscrimination have also been constitutionally protected. During Thailand's military dictatorship, the monarchy and the sangha were closely aligned. After the Cold War, Bangkok shifted toward economic and political liberalization and away from the alliance between the monarchy and the sangha that had characterized the dictatorship era.¹²⁸ For example, although the 1997 Thai constitution mandates that “the King is a Buddhist and Upholder of religions,”¹²⁹ it did not declare Buddhism as Thailand's national religion. It also guaranteed the full rights of citizenship to minority communities. The state promoted inclusive policies and facilitated integrating religious minorities into Thai society. Some Buddhists, though, believed that the equal treatment of religions that the 1997 constitution made possible threatened the superiority of Buddhism. A fringe group of monks lobbied for the constitution to declare Buddhism the official religion of the state, but their efforts were rebuffed.¹³⁰

Buddhists in Thailand have historically rejected the militant Buddhism found in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and monks have comparatively little influence over the state. For its part, the state has historically viewed with suspicion exclusionary Buddhist nationalist movements. As expected, Buddhist violence from the end of the Cold War through the end of the twentieth century remained relatively low, except for a campaign in the mid-1990s against refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border by the Myanmar-based DKBA. Events in Myanmar, not Thailand, appear to have motivated the spate of attacks.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, that status quo began to change. Buddhist monks, in particular, came to be seen once again not just as practitioners of Buddhism but as representatives of the state.¹³¹ This shift directly fed religious tensions in Thailand. Following a coup in 2006 that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the military repealed the 1997 constitution and weakened protections for religious minorities. Key Buddhist leaders who feared that the sangha was losing its stature in Thai society supported the coup.¹³² The increasing entanglement of Buddhism and the state helped to lay the groundwork for interreligious conflict during the following decades.

The renewed alliance between Buddhism and the state coincided with a growing strain of Buddhist nationalism and a deadly and protracted insurgency that occurred in the Deep South. This region has experienced periodic fighting between insurgents and the Thai government since the 1940s. The Malay Muslim insurgents are fighting for a separate independent state comprising Thailand's Muslim-majority southern provinces—Narathiwat, Pattani, parts of Songkhla, and Yala—a region that was for centuries an independent Islamic sultanate with its own culture and language before Thailand annexed it in 1909. In the 1990s, the Thai government's political and economic reforms ameliorated tensions, and many believed that the insurgency had come to an end. In 2004, however, the fighting resurfaced as new insurgent groups formed.¹³³ In that same year, the state declared martial law in southern Thailand following attacks against Buddhist monks.

The Thai government has responded to violence in the Deep South by giving the military near-complete immunity for its operations there. This has also encouraged Buddhist vigilantism.¹³⁴ The bloodshed in the Deep South has led to the emergence of soldier monks—members of the military who are ordained as monks, some even carrying weapons under their robes and donning saffron-colored bulletproof vests.¹³⁵ These soldier monks have formed a loosely connected movement to protect Buddhism from the threat posed by the growing presence of Islam and to reassert Buddhism's preeminence in society. In 2014, for example, vigilante monks attempted the extrajudicial killing of an imam and murdered his three sons.¹³⁶

At the same time, Buddhist spaces, including temples and schools, have become increasingly militarized, and military spaces increasingly religionized. At the order of Queen Suthida Tidjai, the government has armed local Buddhist militias known as Village Defence Volunteers (Chor Ror Bor) to counter the Muslim insurgency. These organizations are distinct from the state's armed forces and law enforcement agencies and train on Buddhist temple compounds. The state's alliance with these groups has deepened the sectarian dimension of the conflict in southern Thailand.¹³⁷ The increasing religion-state entanglement in Thailand has helped to create a climate of impunity that legitimizes majority-on-minority violence. Since 2004, more than 7,000 people, both Buddhists and Muslims, have perished in the conflict.

The Deep South conflict has fueled anxiety—particularly fears over Islamist extremism, receding Buddhist dominance, and eroding national identity—among Thai Buddhists throughout the rest of Thailand.¹³⁸ Islamophobia, encouraged by the insurgency, has become commonplace. Mobs have protested the building of mosques and the standardization of halal food.¹³⁹ Several important monks have openly endorsed violence in the name of protecting Thailand's Buddhist identity.¹⁴⁰ In 2015, a prominent monk publicly declared that for each monk killed in Thailand's Deep South, “a mosque should be burned, starting from the northern part of Thailand southwards.”¹⁴¹ The monk, Phra Maha Apichat, was subsequently expelled from his monastic community. While Buddhist violence remains relatively low in Thailand compared with Myanmar and Sri Lanka, it could increase if current trends persist.

Thailand may be further retreating from its commitment to religious equality—a development that has coincided with the country's democratic decline. In 2014, the Royal Thai Armed Forces launched a coup against the democratically elected government and established a junta called the National Council for Peace and Order. Buddhist nationalists who support the military have claimed that Buddhism is losing its stature in Thailand and that it must remain a key marker of Thai national identity. They have thus demanded protection by the state and more authority over social and political affairs.¹⁴² Within three years, the military government adopted a new constitution that supported Buddhism and weakened religious freedom protections for minorities.¹⁴³ Article 67 of the document states: “In supporting and protecting Buddhism, which is the religion observed by the majority of Thai people for a long period of time, the State should promote and support education and dissemination of dharmic principles of Theravada Buddhism for the development of mind and wisdom, and shall have measures and mechanisms to prevent Buddhism from being undermined in any form. The State should also encourage Buddhists to participate in implementing such measures or mechanisms.”¹⁴⁴ The special protections that Article 67 offers for Theravada Buddhism can be understood as the military regime's effort to bolster its legitimacy through religious co-optation.

The relationship between temple and state in Thailand today resembles the historical relationship between Buddhism—a traditional pillar of Thai nationalism—and the monarchy that existed during the colonial era and Siam's transition to modern Thailand.¹⁴⁵ Just as the king served as the patron of the sangha during this time—a symbiotic relationship known as the “Two Wheels of Dhamma”—contemporary Thai Buddhist nationalists expect the state to protect them from their perceived religious competitors and intra-religious schisms.¹⁴⁶ They believe that they have a sacred duty to maintain the cultural dominance of Buddhism.

As Buddhism and the state have become more entangled following the coup, the government has heightened its military engagement in the southern regions. The military's presence in the Deep South has been guided by special emergency laws that infringe on civil liberties, further alienating an already marginalized population and emboldening Buddhist vigilantes. This, in turn, has prompted deadly attacks by insurgent groups that have resulted in civilian casualties, attacks on Buddhist monks, and forced displacement of civilians. The Pew Research Center notes that religious hostilities remain high. These tensions partly reflect the activities of nationalist Buddhist groups such as the Buddhism Protection Organization for Peace.¹⁴⁷ Buddhist leaders have neither called for peace and reconciliation nor condemned abuses by Thai security forces.

In Singapore, the tiny city-state situated at the southernmost point of continental Asia, about one-third of the population adheres to Buddhist traditions. Yet according to the Pew Research Center, Singapore is also the world's most religiously diverse country: Sizable portions of the population follow Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and numerous folk religions. About 20 percent of Singaporeans do not identify with any religion.¹⁴⁸

Such a religious constellation might be a recipe for sectarian strife and violence, especially because the country is about one-quarter the size of the smallest U.S. state, Rhode Island. People of different religious traditions intermingle daily, given that land is scarce and the religious demography is highly fragmented. Surprisingly, though, Singapore has not only avoided religious conflict but flourished amid its stunning religious diversity. Singapore consistently experiences low levels of religious-based social hostilities.¹⁴⁹ In fact, a majority of Singaporeans believe that the country's myriad religions, ethnicities, and cultures make it a better place to live—only 4 percent believe that diversity makes it a worse place to live.¹⁵⁰ Furthermore, Singapore ranks very high on several measures of tolerance.¹⁵¹ Remarkably, Singapore's religious peace has endured, even as religious hostilities have escalated in surrounding countries.

What explains Singapore's interreligious harmony in the face of inauspicious conditions that have led to religious tension and conflict elsewhere? The country's interreligious amity is the result of the state's carefully designed religion-related policies, which the country's various faith communities support.¹⁵² When Singapore gained independence in 1965, its leaders quickly recognized that religious-based societal strife could develop in their highly multicultural country. They understood that political secularism, especially the separation of religion and state, equality among the different religious groups, and freedom of religion could ameliorate the centrifugal forces of religious identity. Article 12 of the constitution, for example, prohibits “discrimination against citizens of Singapore on the ground only of religion,”¹⁵³ and Article 15 grants to every person “the right to profess and practise his religion and to propagate it” and to every religious group “the right to manage its own religious affairs.”¹⁵⁴ In practice, the state does not favor any particular religious tradition, nor does it base national identity on any religion. Instead, it has cultivated a strong national identity that encapsulates Singapore's many ethnic and religious identities. By separating religion and politics, the state has guarded against the potential weaponization of religion. Unlike in many other Buddhist-majority or Buddhist-plural countries, Singaporean Buddhists do not generally support basing national laws on Buddhist dharma.¹⁵⁵

At the same time, the government pursued strong laws to prevent religion from becoming a source of division. As the Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs noted, “Singapore is a multi-racial and multi-religious society. Therefore, racial and religious harmony is vital for Singapore's social cohesion. This harmony does not come naturally—we need to take the effort to build trust and acceptance between different races and religions, and protect the common space that we have.”¹⁵⁶ The state regulates interreligious relations and manages the peaceful coexistence of religious groups through bodies such as the Presidential Council for Religious Harmony, the Presidential Council for Minority Rights, and the Community Remedial Initiative, as well as through laws such as the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.¹⁵⁷

The state acts quickly, decisively, and unapologetically to ensure peaceful coexistence when the public expresses religious convictions that threaten societal harmony, especially religious bigotry or insensitivity. For example, the state forces people to pay fines or serve jail sentences for making inflammatory remarks about particular religious traditions, in accordance with the 1948 Sedition Act. The state's commitment to religious harmony and equality has prevented majoritarianism and extremist ideologies from developing.

In summary, Singapore's proactive political secularism—shaped by its unique multiculturalism, early episodes of religious tensions, and land scarcity—differs markedly from the West's laissez-faire form of secularism. Singapore sometimes limits religious freedom when religious practices infringe on others' rights, use insensitive or inflammatory speech, or threaten public order. Yet Singapore has also successfully defused the same religious tensions that have plagued other religiously heterogeneous countries.¹⁵⁸

As a consequence of these secular policies, Buddhism (as well as other religions) is much less violent in Singapore than in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, or Thailand. While isolated cases of communal tensions have occurred throughout Singapore's short history as an independent nation, they have not spilled over into large-scale hostilities between religious communities that could threaten the harmony of Singapore's multicultural society.

The brief case studies presented here also help rule out important alternative explanations for Buddhist violence: poverty, religious diversity, and lack of democracy. Regarding poverty, Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world; its GDP per capita ($141,553) is much higher than the positive cases.¹⁵⁹ Among those cases, however, there is considerable variation: Myanmar ($5,953), Sri Lanka ($14,460), Thailand ($23,465).¹⁶⁰ Yet Thailand's higher GDP per capita has not inoculated it from Buddhist violence. This affirms the results of the statistical analyses, which show an inconsistent relationship between GDP per capita and Buddhist violence.

On religious diversity, higher levels of heterogeneity do not appear to correlate with higher levels of Buddhist violence. Singapore is by far the most diverse of the four countries in our study, yet it experiences little religious violence, Buddhist or otherwise. The other three countries are less religiously diverse: 69–93 percent of the population subscribes to Buddhism (Thailand, 93 percent; Myanmar, 80 percent; and Sri Lanka, 69 percent).¹⁶¹ Our statistical analyses of the universe of cases do show a positive relationship between diversity and violence, but one that does not attenuate the effect of religious privilege.

Finally, levels of democracy show contrary effects on Buddhist violence. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, Buddhist violence has accompanied democratic retrenchment. In contrast, democratization in Myanmar coincided with increased Buddhist violence, but so did increasing authoritarianism thereafter. Singapore is a hybrid regime with a parliamentary political system that one political party has dominated since its independence. Singapore restricts civil liberties, yet it has not experienced Buddhist violence. This result also affirms the statistical analysis, which finds inconsistent effects of democracy on Buddhist violence.

Buddhist teachings condemn violence in every form. Ahimsa, a term meaning “not to injure,” is a primary virtue in Buddhism. For this reason, people associate this religion with teachings such as compassion, nonviolence, and inner peace, and otherworldly practices such as meditation, asceticism, and mindfulness. True, the Dalai Lama, Zen, and the California counterculture represent one face of Buddhism. Yet this religion has another, darker side. It is an ahistorical fable that Buddhism is a wholly peaceful religion, and it should be unsurprising when Buddhism, like other religions, turns violent.¹⁶² Indeed, throughout its long and diverse history, there have been many instances of Buddhist communities and individuals engaging in violence. Scholars of global religion have long challenged the myth of pacifist Buddhism. Less understood is why Buddhism has sometimes become weaponized in service of bloodshed.

This article has attempted to offer a structural explanation for Buddhist violence, one that highlights how religious and political institutions interact. We have argued that where Buddhism and the state have become entangled to a greater degree, Buddhist violence is more likely to occur. Such entanglement effectively signals to favored religious groups that the state gives them a green light to intimidate, harass, and even attack religious minorities. Politically empowered religious groups tend to carry out most of the religious violence in these cases; they use their privileged standing to justify attacking out-groups, ostensibly to protect Buddhism's cultural hegemony against perceived threats stemming from religious outsiders. We tested this theory using both a statistical analysis of Buddhist violence in Asia and case studies of Buddhist violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and its absence in Singapore. These analyses provide strong support for the article's core argument that at the heart of Buddhist violence in Asia lies a paradox of privilege.

This study makes important contributions to the field of religion and violence. First, it broadens the discussion of religious violence. Since at least the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of scholarly works have focused on Islam. In contrast, social scientists have not subjected Buddhism to much systematic treatment. The theory and findings of this article call on social scientists to take Buddhist violence seriously. Second, it moves the discussion of religious violence beyond that of religious ideas. Of course, religious actors' beliefs about the use of force and the morality of doing so matter greatly in understanding faith-based violence. But focusing on the ethical or doctrinal content of religion alone cannot build generalizable theories regarding the causes of such violence.

The argument and findings of this study also carry important insights for policymakers in Buddhist-majority countries and beyond. Political elites often believe that they can bolster government legitimacy, cultivate social trust, decrease religious grievances, and avert violence by favoring a historically and culturally dominant religious community.¹⁶³ Yet, as this study has shown, religious favoritism often has a dark side—it can provide a pretext for majoritarian vigilantes to attack religious minorities. In countries marked by the privilege of historically and culturally dominant faith traditions, religious vigilantes can claim that they act to uphold the law, even as their actions destroy social harmony, disrupt the economy, and promote instability and insecurity. Consequently, policies grounded in religious privilege end up being counterproductive, creating the very ills they are designed to prevent.

In the cases of Myanmar and Sri Lanka surveyed here, the government sometimes tried unsuccessfully to stem episodes of interreligious violence that it had helped unleash but had spiraled out of control. Our findings suggest that states would be better off pursuing policies grounded in religion-state separation, religious equality, and freedom of religion. Indeed, our study contributes to a growing literature on the nature and value of regimes of religious toleration.¹⁶⁴ The hope thus lies in the possibility that religious and state actors may, out of self-interest, reconsider the notion that alliances between religion and the state are beneficial. Such a recognition might address one of the key factors behind the global rise in religious violence that has blighted much of the twenty-first century.

The authors thank Jonathan Fox, Jason Klocek, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. A previous draft of this article was presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the International Studies Association–Asia Pacific Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. A grant from the Singapore Ministry of Education (RG 45/22) helped to fund this project. An online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/T09KUG.