ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of violence against Muslim mosques and Buddhist monks in southern Thailand. It presents data collected on violence against sacred spaces around the world during 2009–2010, and identifies strong cases where such violence engenders further violence. The question, however, is whether the attacks against sacred spaces and religious personnel that have transpired in southern Thailand are specific to this particular context of deadly conflict or representative of a deadly global trend of ethnoreligious conflict at present. The chapter aims to differentiate violence against non-Islamic sacred spaces and non-Muslim religious personnel or those in congregation/procession into three groups: Christianity that includes Catholic, Protestant, and Coptic; Judaism; and others that include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Catholic churches were attacked in Vietnam, India, Iraq, and Nepal; while Protestant churches became targets of arson, raid, burning, and shooting in Malaysia, India, Nigeria, and China.
