[1][2] Hassner's work focuses on religion and conflict, especially territorial disputes over sacred spaces.
He is a faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at U.C.
In War on Sacred Grounds,[7] Hassner argued that conflicts over holy places are difficult to resolve because these sites pose an indivisibility problem: they cannot be shared or divided the way other pieces of land are often shared to resolve conflict.
[8][9] The Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Mecca function as key case studies as do contested shrines in India.
He shows how sacred time and space, rituals and authority structures, had an impact on soldiers, commanders, and units.
In this book and related publications, Hassner attempts to shift the focus of the study of religion and war away from studying terrorists and insurgents and onto the effects of religion on conventional armies, including Western secular armies.
He argues that the "myth of the ticking time bomb scenario" as a dangerous yet influential metaphor that bears no relationship to reality.
His book analyzes dozens of cases of torture from Spain and Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, relying on archival evidence from Europe and the Americas.