Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies By Güneş Murat Tezcür. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. 270 pp. $31.95 paperback.

In August 2014, militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State descended upon the Yezidi communities of northern Iraq, unleashing one of the most devastating campaigns of mass violence in recent history.Within days, villages across the Sinjar region were emptied-men and boys executed in fields and schoolyards, women and girls abducted and sold into slavery, and thousands forced to flee toward Mount Sinjar, where many perished from hunger and thirst.The intent was unmistakable: the annihilation of a people and the erasure of their faith.The United Nations and numerous human rights organizations would later recognize these atrocities as acts of genocide.The Yezidi tragedy stands as a stark reminder of the lethal potential embedded in the politics of religious difference.It illustrates how theological boundary-making, when fused with militant ideology and permissive political conditions, can legitimize the extermination of entire communities.More broadly, it exemplifies the precarious existence of "liminal minorities"-groups situated neither fully inside nor outside dominant religious and political orders, whose ambiguous status renders them especially vulnerable to exclusion, displacement, and violence.It is precisely this condition of vulnerability that Gne Murat Tezcr interrogates in Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies.The term "liminal minorities" refers to specific groups that are offshoots of the dominant religion but whose theological beliefs and cultural practices differ from those of the majority in fundamental ways.Because these groups have roots in the dominant faith tradition-but nevertheless depart from its teachings and practices-they are castigated as "deviant" or "heretical" in ways that other faiths, which do not share this genealogical connection, are not.Drawing on an ambitious comparative framework, Tezcr examines why certain religious minorities become targets of mass violence while others do not.Through a combination of historical-comparative and quantitative analysis, he advances a