How have long-standing and unconscious secular assumptions about religion shaped the post-9/11 climate and its wars? Stacey Gutkowski explores this little-examined, yet crucial, element of British perceptions of and policy towards Jihadism over the last decade, to draw critical conclusions about the relationship between war and the secular. She points to a surprisingly coherent body of secular beliefs that have fuelled policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, and that have had mixed results - responsible for both positive strategies and tragic errors. The theory Gutkowski develops on the impact of this secular approach to warfare holds a broader global significance, and cannot be viewed as just a British phenomenon. This book addresses ongoing and critical debates, such as the 'overreach' of Western liberal interventionism in the Middle East, and speaks to policy-makers, security analysts and students of IR, Foreign Policy and Security Studies.

How do secular Jewish Israeli millennials feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having come of age in the shadow of the Oslo peace process, when political leaders have used ethno-religious rhetoric as a dividing force? This is the first book to analyse blowback to Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli religious nationalism among this group in their own words, based on fieldwork, interviews and surveys conducted after the 2014 Gaza War. Offering a close reading of the lived experience and generational memory of participants, Gutkowski offers a new explanation for why attitudes to Occupation have grown increasingly conservative over the past two decades. Examining the intimate emotional ecology of Occupation, this book offers a new argument about neo-Romantic conceptions of citizenship. Beyond the case study, it also provides a new theoretical framework and methods for researchers and students studying emotion, religion, nationalism, secularism and political violence. -- .