Religious Freedom as National Security: Empirical evidence from the FRUS

• In Event: Forms of Foreign Intervention and its Consequences

Abstract

The United States has promoted international religious freedom for well over a century. To date, however, international relations scholars have not provided a theoretical or quantitative analysis of this phenomenon. This paper contends that IRFP began as one policy among others as a substitution for security strategy short of coercive force. The contigent events of the Cold War and path dependency shaped the continued reliance on religious freedom such that by the late 1990s, IRFP was a robust set of smaller policies and integrated into the foreign policy goals of the United States. The authors test this theory with an empirical model using concordance text analysis on an original dataset covering 88 years of the Foreign Relations of the United States.

Authors

• Heather Ba, University of Missouri

• Luke Matthew Perez, Arizona State University