Investigating the Role of Religious Salience in Terrorist Violence

• In Event: Posters II

Abstract

Recent work has considered the role of the rise of radical Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, however there continues to be little attention directed to Central and South American terrorism. While empirical literature has connected religious homogeneity to potential deterrent effects in traditional crime, little work has extended this to terrorist violence. Seeking to address this research gap, the present study explores the role of religious salience at the attack level in Central and South American terrorist violence. Since the role of religion and religious salience is theoretically and empirically equivocal, a two-tailed hypothesis is considered. Using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a statistical model is presented to consider the relative risk of an attack on Roman Catholic religious holidays as contrasted with non-holidays. Moreover, the incident level data are modeled to demonstrate potential differences in degree of violence across the two conditions in nine predominantly Catholic countries. While the preliminary findings suggest differences in violence across the conditions, future research must consider group level patterns and time-series data.

Author

• Michael H. Becker, University of Maryland, College Park