Between Faith and Fanaticism: Investigating the Psychological and Social Drivers of Religious Violence in Africa

Abstract

Religious violence in Africa is often attributed to theological extremism; however, interdisciplinary scholarship suggests that religion more often functions as a mobilising frame embedded within structural inequality, political exclusion, and contested identity than as an autonomous cause. Drawing on a critical interpretive synthesis of peer-reviewed literature and major institutional reports published between 2000 and 2025, this article argues that religious violence emerges through the interaction of structural drivers—economic marginalisation, uneven development, governance deficits, corruption, and regional exclusion—and socially embedded psychological mediators, including identity threat, moral disengagement, cognitive closure, and the quest for significance. Comparative illustrations from Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Mozambique, and the Central African Republic show how material grievances become sacralised and organisationally embedded in extremist movements. The article advances a Structural–Psychological Interaction Model that conceptualises violence as a recursive process in which structural vulnerability and identity-based meaning-making mutually reinforce one another. By bridging macro-structural inequality and socially mediated
cognition, the study contributes to sociological debates on conflict and state fragility and argues that sustainable peacebuilding requires integrated governance reform, economic inclusion, institutional legitimacy, and community-level recognition.