Catholicgauze will be at AAG 2010!

This upcoming year's American Association of Geographers convention will be held in Washington D.C., Catholicgauze's main base. As such, I will be at the convention! Be sure to drop me a line at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com or comment if you will be there!

At the convention I will present the following:

Title:	Geography of Religious Wars
Keywords:	Religion, War, Conflict, Islam, Christianity
Type:	Paper
Abstract:	Religion has long been a both a primary and side factor in why wars are fought. Most of the time religion is more of a national identifier rather than the primary cause of conflict though cases do exist where religion is the main basis of war. Comparing the wars of today to the last 200 years of conflict reveal that religious conflict has gone through cycles of frequency. The two separate causes of religious strife are puritanical wars against intra-religious sects and "holy war" against another religious group. Spatial, both "bloody borders" and interior conflicts appear to ebb and flow in cycles as well. In terms of religious group violence, Christianity-caused conflicts have long been contained to nominal sects while Islamic-based jihad has been used more against fellow Muslims than non-Muslims. As for non-Abrahamic religions, there is a small yet recently revived trend where religion has gone from merely an identifier to driver for conflict, especially in Asia.