ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief discussion of religion and its cross-pollination with ethnicity, rationality, authoritarianism, gender, Utopia and Arcadia, progress, and colonialism. In Islamic State there is the delineation of in-group and out-group according to religious identity. The chapter focuses on religion as a facilitator and catalyst of genocide, as well as some of the ethical aspects of religion that have implications for intervention in genocide. The kind of narcissism is intimately connected with sentiments of ethnocentrism and cultural superiority that loom large in the infliction of genocidal policies against so-called “out-groups”. Most scholars will acknowledge that genocide is intimately related to ethnic conflict. Genocides tend to occur under highly authoritarian, autocratic regimes that command the allegiance of a subject population and mobilize it for genocidal ends. Probably the single most prominent theme in comparative genocide studies these days is the examination of genocide in the context of colonialism and imperialism.
