Yasemin Akbaba

Does Religious Discrimination Promote Dissent? A Quantitative Analysis

Can religious grievances serve as a catalyst for political violence? This paper seeks to examine the impact of religious discrimination on the probability of ethnic dissent. It is argued that religious discrimination leads to the generation of grievances, which in turn encourages ethnoreligious minorities to engage in peaceful and violent opposition against the state. To test this argument, the authors collected data on religious discrimination of ethnoreligious minorities for the period 1990–2003. The empirical findings suggest that religious discrimination is a strong predictor of violent dissent, including rebellion and civil war. As the level of religious discrimination against ethnoreligious groups increases, the probability of rebellion and civil war heightens, controlling for several other state and group-level factors. The exact opposite is true for protest, however: higher levels of religious discrimination are associated with lower levels of non-violent protest activity. These findings suggest that the impact of religious discrimination on anti-state activity is not uniform, and that religious discrimination encourages only violent forms of dissent.

The Religion and State-Minorities dataset

This article presents the Religion and State-Minorities (RASM) dataset addressing its design, collection, and utility. RASM codes religious discrimination by governments against all 566 minorities in 175 countries which make a minimum population cutoff. It includes 24 specific types of religious discrimination coded yearly from 1990 to 2002. Religious discrimination measures the absence of the human right of religious freedom which includes limits on religious practices such as worship as well as limits on religious institutions such as churches and mosques which are not placed on the majority group. Thus the dataset focuses on the restriction of religious group rights. Most similar datasets, including those that focus on human rights in general, include a single discrimination score for a country. RASM is the first to contain an accounting of religious discrimination against all relevant religious minorities on an individual basis while avoiding some methodological problems of previous similar data collections. In order to demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we examine the relationship between religious identity and religious discrimination. We find that both majority and minority identities matter in predicting the treatment of religious minorities. This demonstration that codings for individual minorities add to our understanding of the correlates of religious discrimination is illustrative of the potential uses of this dataset. It also indicates that this type of data can be useful in other types of studies where dyads based on religious identity are relevant, such as studies of ethnic conflict and civil war.

Culture vs. Rational Choice: Assessing the Causes of Religious Discrimination in Muslim States

This study focuses on explaining the variation in the treatment of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries using a novel dataset on religious discrimination—the Religion and State-Minorities (RASM) Dataset. As few theories exist to explain the causes of religious discrimination, this study compares theories related to general religion-state relations based on ideology, culture, and rational choice. We find that while political and structural factors are important in explaining variation in levels of discrimination across Muslim countries, ideational factors may help to explain why certain minority groups appear to be targeted more than others within individual countries. Regional and cultural differences in levels of discrimination exist across the Muslim world, and the identity of the religious minority group matters in determining why some groups face greater repression than others. We argue that knowing the targets of discrimination is important in developing theory about the causes of it.

Restrictions on the Religious Practices of Religious Minorities: A Global Survey

This study examines sources of religious discrimination with a particular emphasis on comparison of the identity-versus structure-related causes. Using a dyad-based analysis, it asks whether and when majorities behave differently in general and whether levels of religious discrimination are different against different minority groups. The Religion and State-Minorities (RASM) dataset, which includes data on 598 minorities in 177 countries covering the years 1990–2008, is used. The results show that specific minority and majority religions tend to have unique patterns of discrimination. Thus religious identity plays an important role in causing religious discrimination. Also, when controlling for other factors, Christian minorities experience the highest levels of discrimination around the world, including in the Christian world other than in Western democracies where Muslims experience the highest levels of discrimination.

Religious Discrimination against Muslim Minorities in Christian Majority Countries: A Unique Case?

Previous research on Muslims in Christian majority states either focuses exclusively on Muslims or assesses public opinion concerning Muslims and/or religious minorities but does not assess cross-national trends comparing Muslims and non-Muslims. This study compares the extent of religious discrimination against Muslim minorities in Christian majority countries to the treatment of other religious minorities in the same countries as well as to the treatment of religious minorities in non-Christian countries. We utilize a new dataset that includes 24 types of restrictions placed on the religious practices or religious institutions of 590 religious minorities in 175 countries. This measure is more detailed than any previous measure and, unlike previous studies, we include all religious minorities which meet a minimum population threshold. We find that Muslim minorities do not suffer from disproportionate levels of religious discrimination when compared to other minorities in Christian majority states. This is true both of the extent of discrimination and specific types of discrimination. Discrimination is relatively low in general in Christian majority states, other than those in the former Soviet bloc, when compared to non-Christian states.

One-Sided Crises in World Politics: A Study of Oxymoron, Violence and Outcomes

This paper focuses on crises and seeks to extend understanding of escalation processes, outcomes, and legacy. We go beyond Hewitt and Wilkenfelds (1999) initial study of one-sided crises, which emphasized crisis type as an explanation for violence levels, in three ways: We (1) pursue an explanation for why some crises remain one-sided; (2) include two additional crisis attributes, protractedness of conflict and ethnicity, which are expected to impact upon the role of violence; and (3) link outcomes and subsequent tension levels for adversaries with crisis type (i.e., one-sided versus others) to expand the potential explanatory range of one-sidedness. To achieve these goals, the paper unfolds in four parts. First, the study is placed in the context of ongoing research on crises in world politics, most notably as carried out by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. The second part presents a theoretical overview of the factors that might distinguish crisis type, along with those deemed important in determining violence, outcomes, and subsequent tension. Explicit hypotheses are derived as well. The third part conveys data, variables, data analysis for crisis type (Stage 1) and violence, outcomes, and subsequent tension levels (Stage 2), and a comparison of results for the two stages. The fourth and final part summarizes the papers accomplishments. Key findings are that (1) we can distinguish crisis type on the basis of characteristics such as contiguity, gravity of threat, and civil war involvement; and (2) the Hewitt and Wilkenfeld model is most successful in explaining violence as opposed to outcome and legacy, which seem especially difficult to account for, even with the addition of theoretically important factors like ethnicity and protracted conflict.

Minorities on ‘Civilizational’ Fault Lines: An Assessment of Religious Discrimination

Abstract Previous studies examined various aspects of Huntingtons controversial ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. This study aims to quantitatively explore the theory to understand whether civilizational ethnoreligious minorities, i.e. ethnoreligious minorities that belong to a different civilization than the majority, face religious discrimination more than non-civilizational ones, especially in Western and Islamic civilizations. Analysis shows that non-civilizational minorities are discriminated against more than civilizational minorities. Findings also suggest that while civilizational minorities are discriminated against less compared to non-civilizational ones in Islamic civilizations, Western civilizations discriminate against civilizational minorities more compared to non-civilizational minorities.

Did Secularism Fail? The Rise of Religion in Turkish Politics

Religious movements have long been challenging the modernist and secularist ideas around the world. Within the last decade or so, pro-religious parties made significant electoral advances in various countries, including India, Sudan, Algeria, and the Palestinian territories. In this article, we focus on the rise of the pro-religious Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi - AKP) to power in the 2002 elections in Turkey. Using the Turkish experience with political Islam, we evaluate the explanatory value of Mark Juergensmeyers rise of religious nationalism theory, with a special emphasis on the “failed secularism” argument. Our analysis indicates that the theoretical approach formulated by Juergensmeyer has a great deal of explanatory power; however, it does not provide a complete explanation for the success of the AKP. The rise of religion in Turkish politics is the result of a complex process over long years of encounter and confrontation between two frameworks of order, starting with the sudden imposition of secularism from above, when the republic was established. Hence, to understand the rise of religion in contemporary Turkish politics, an in-depth understanding of history, politics, and the sources of tension between secularists and Islamists is essential. The findings of this article have important implications for other countries, especially those that are experiencing a resurgence of religion in politics, and are struggling to integrate religious parties into a democratic system.