This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
News coverage of the Central African Republic's conflict settled early on a shorthand description: a religious war between the country's Muslim minority and Christian majority. The label fit the visible pattern of violence, Seleka forces overwhelmingly Muslim, anti-balaka militias organized in the name of Christian and animist communities, mosques and churches deliberately targeted, and international organizations including Amnesty International repeated the framing in their own reporting.
Scholars who have studied the conflict closely argue the religious label explains less than it seems to. Ludovic Lado, an Africa Program research scholar at the Wilson Center, has written that religious identity became a marker of political and factional loyalty during the fighting rather than the fighting's actual cause, since Christian-Muslim relations in the Central African Republic carried no significant history of conflict before the Seleka's 2013 offensive. Louisa Lombard, a Yale anthropologist who conducted years of fieldwork in the country, makes the same case at length in her study of the war, arguing that a genuinely political struggle for control of the state and its resources, fought by factions recruiting along whatever lines of solidarity were available to them, hardened into intercommunal violence that then looked, and increasingly became, religious in the way it was carried out, even though it did not begin that way.
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry's own 2014 report reached a similar conclusion: religious tension had not previously divided the country in any serious way, and it was the cycle of Seleka and anti-balaka atrocities itself that manufactured the religious character later observers took for a cause.