Politicized Religion, Armed Conflict, and Planetary Health: A Seven-Dimensional Framework for Analysis and Peacebuilding

Armed conflict is a planetary health concern because it disrupts interconnected human, institutional, cultural, and ecological systems on which health and collective well-being depend. Religion is rarely the sole cause of such conflict, but it may become a consequential and changing dimension when political actors use sacred language, identities, institutions, memories, and symbols to mobilize supporters, define enemies, legitimize coercion, or resist compromise. Because these processes can influence social cohesion, institutional trust, humanitarian action, and the capacity for cooperation and recovery, understanding the political activation of religion is relevant to planetary health. This conceptual integrative review synthesizes scholarship from conflict studies, political science, religious studies, law, psychology, public health, and peacebuilding to clarify how such politicization can be analyzed without reducing multidimensional conflicts to religion alone. This article proposes seven analytical dimensions: religious rhetoric in political discourse; religious identity as a boundary of group division; involvement of religious institutions and leaders; targeting of religious sites and symbols; religious justification of violence; religious framing of resistance to external intervention; and mobilization of historical grievances with religious content. These dimensions form a heuristic framework rather than a validated diagnostic instrument. From a planetary health perspective, the framework identifies pathways through which politicized religion can damage population health and the social and institutional systems on which health depends, including humanitarian access, public-health trust, displacement, cultural continuity, psychosocial well-being, social cohesion, and cooperative governance. The same religious resources may also support mediation, restraint, resilience, and reconciliation. This article links each dimension to proportionate peacebuilding and planetary health responses and identifies priorities for empirical validation, comparative coding, and longitudinal research.