Peaceful or Violent Protest? Analyzing “Religious Minorities at Risk”

• In Event: Ethnicity and Patterns of Violence

Abstract

Peaceful or violent protest? Analyzing “Religious Minorities at Risk”
Relative Deprivation theory (Gurr 1970; 2001) expects that minority marginalization and grievances significantly contribute to violent conflict. Cederman and colleagues have found evidence that economic and political marginalization increase the risk of ethnic armed conflict. However, this might not be the case for all kinds of groups. It appears that grievances do not inevitably induce religious minorities to engage in violent conflict. Empirical research shows that actual discrimination of religious groups leads to grievances but grievances do not necessarily lead to violence (Basedau, Fox et al. 2016). Relative deprivation may explain conflict but not necessarily violent conflict. The study of the religion-conflict link still needs to directly connect to the research on the logic of non-violent and peaceful protest (e.g. Chenoweth and colleagues). The question thus is: What explains peaceful or violent mobilization by religious minorities?
Theoretically, several hypotheses could explain this puzzle. Beyond characteristics of the state and society at large, group characteristics such as overlaps with ethnicity or organizational resources of minorities might increase the mobilization capacity and thus political mobilization in general. The intensity and kind of deprivation and grievances may vary (religious, economic, political, with more intense grievances being more prone to violence; strong competition within the group may also increase the likelihood to resort to the use of force. Thus far, however, we have lacked the specific data necessary to empirically test these and other propositions. Contributing to filling the gap, we introduce a new data set on “religious minorities at risk” that enables us to test a set of relevant hypotheses.
Using a motive‐opportunity framework, we generally assume that members of religious minorities who feel discriminated against must be willing and able to engage in peaceful and violent forms of protest – and that certain conditions of objective marginalization, subjective grievances and group and state characteristics are required for grievances to result in peaceful or violent dissent. We test corresponding propositions by comparing over 700 minorities and their characteristics for the period of the years 2000-2014. The data set specifically contains new data on structural characteristics of the religious minorities (geographical concentration, overlaps with ethnicity, economic horizontal inequalities, actual religious discrimination), the intensity and type of their grievances (religious, political, economic), as well as the organizational resources of the groups (size, organizations, previous protest experience). Preliminary findings, on smaller samples of our data set, suggest that relative economic and political deprivation may create concrete grievances that in combination with religious and ethnic boundaries running parallel can explain differences in the use of violence for protest.

Authors

• Matthias Basedau, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Jonathan Fox, Bar Ilan University

• Tom Konzack, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies