Religious Pluralism and Mass Violence: A Global Analysis

• In Event: Religion and Violence

Abstract

The role of religion in violent conflicts has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Offering a critical assessment of the notion of “religious violence,” this paper utilizes advanced quantitative methods to address two interrelated questions: How do the involvement of political actors with religious agendas affect the intensity of civil wars? How do the state regulation of religion as well as religious demographics, fractionalization, and polarization affect the likelihood of mass killings?

The quantitative literature in the study of religion and armed conflict follows two conventional approaches. The identity based approach identifies conflicts involving parties with different religious markers as having a religious dimension (e.g., Catholics versus Protestants in Northern Ireland, Muslims versus Buddhists in Myanmar) (Fox 2004; Bormann et al. 2017). Yet, this approach is vulnerable to conceptual overstretching (i.e., labeling a conflict as religious even when religion is irrelevant to mobilization and issues at stake). Next, it overlooks cases where belligerents belong to the same religious identity group but espouse dramatically opposing positions about the role of religion in public affairs. The issue based approach aims to mitigate both of these problems and gives primacy to stated and expressed positions of these parties (e.g., Svennson and Nilsson 2018; Henne 2019; Maoz and Henderson 2020). It identifies the conflicts where a party makes religious claims (i.e., establishing God’s rule, defeating infidels, etc.) as having religious incompatibility (Basedau et al. 2016). At the same time, neither of these approaches directly addresses the well-founded skepticism that differences in religious beliefs could be peripheral to the motives of belligerents who primarily pursue material interests, social status, or political power. It is important to not equate the presence of political actors making religious claims and pursuing religious agendas with the presence of political actors with religious motives. Cognizant of these challenges, we do not make any a priori assumptions about the role of religious beliefs and values in shaping motivations to fight. Instead we aim to identify whether certain political configurations of religion generate a more enabling environment for high intensity civil wars and massacres.

To explore how religious mobilization by political actors and state-religion relations affect the intensity of civil wars, we rely on the Religion and Armed Conflict (RELAC) dataset (Svennson and Nilsson 2018). Our statistical analyses suggest that blanket statements about the role of religion in civil wars are unwarranted. Religious incompatible civil wars tend to be more lethal under some conditions but not others. Additionally, high intensity civil wars with a religious dimension also exhibit a strong geographical clustering. In particular, armed conflicts in Asia (but not in the Americas and many African countries) that are fought over government (but not territory) tend to be more lethal when they involve a religious dimension. Our analyses add an important geographical qualification to scholarly claims that conflicts fought over religious issues tend to be more intense. Besides, our statistical analyses based on the Religion and State (RAS) dataset (Fox 2020) reveal the state regulation of religion has either direct or conditional on the intensity of civil wars. Most notably, neither official religions nor blasphemy laws have a consistent effect on conflict intensity.

To explore how religious discrimination affects the patterns of massacres, we rely on the Targeted Mass Killing (TMK) dataset (Butcher et al. 2020). We first show that religious groups are more likely to be victims of massacres in more recent times (i.e., in the post-cold war era). Our extensive statistical analyses show that when the state is unable or unwilling to protect religious minorities from violence and punish perpetrators of such violence, a massacre targeting any group, whether political, ethnic, or religious, is more likely to take place. This finding is consistent with the literature that point out to the role of religious discrimination in fostering political violence (Akbaba and Taydas 2011). Moreover, the presence of armed conflicts involving groups pursuing religious agendas contribute to the likelihood of massacre occurrences.

Overall, this global survey about the role of religion in making armed conflict more lethal and contributing to massacres reveals a complicated picture. While it is often tempting to make bold claims about how religious belief systems make human affairs more or less violent, our analyses utilizing information from a variety of cross-national dataset reach more nuanced conclusions.

Authors

• Günes Murat Tezcur, University of Central Florida

• Joshua Lambert, University of Central Florida