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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.

This paper focuses on crises and seeks to extend understanding of escalation processes, outcomes, and legacy. We go beyond Hewitt and Wilkenfeld's (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. TheWe are grateful to J. Joseph Hewitt for a valuable commentary and data. Authors names appear in alphabetical order for this collaborative work.

This study reports on an international project in which students taking the course Contemporary Issues in Turkish Politics in spring 2011 and fall 2011 at two institutions of higher education, 'Gettysburg College' in the United States and 'Izmir University of Economics' in Turkey, worked together in virtual learning environments to complete various tasks as part of their course work. The project employed a blend of traditional and technology-based teaching methods in order to introduce a technology like Skype in a bi-national learning environment in Turkey. Students collaborated and interacted with their international counterparts in two different virtual contexts. First, classrooms in the two countries were merged via Skype three times to conduct classroom-to-classroom discussion sessions on Turkish politics. Second, students were paired across locations to work on several assignments. In this paper, our goal is to present how Skype is used in a bi-national context as a blended teaching tool in an upper-level college course for instructors pursuing a similar exercise. In addition to outlining the process with a focus on Skype discussions and one-on-one student projects, we provide actual assignments and discussion questions. Students' views elicited through surveys administered throughout the semester are presented alongside anecdotal evidence to reflect how the project was received.