Francis, Suzanne2025-03-132025-03-132025-03-12Francis, S. (2025). Violence against Muslims: Conquered, not fully colonized, in the Making of the Muslim “Other” in the Central African Republic. African Studies Review, 68(1), 68–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.2520002-020610.1017/asr.2024.252http://hdl.handle.net/10034/629298© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of African Studies AssociationMuslims in the Central African Republic have experienced extreme violence for more than a decade. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this article shows how the foundations for contemporary violence were created through colonial and postcolonial state-making. The civilizing mission of republican colonialism set Muslims apart. Lifestyle and mobility were never fully colonized; escape depicted difference. Nationalist liberation mythologies render Muslim citizenship as foreign, precarious, and subject to ongoing contestation. Pentecostalism, a lateral liberation philosophy presented as patriotism, provides power to anti-Muslim discourse. Violence against Muslims is situated in an accumulated “pastness” of state-making and struggle in Central African historiography.enhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/MuslimsViolenceCentral African RepublicConflictanti-BalakaState-makingPentecostalismColonialismMobilityNationalist mythologiesArticle1555-2462African Studies Review2025-03-1368