Explaining religious terrorism: A data-mined analysis

Political Research Quarterly

Zaihra

Fidler

2017

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In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton’s proposition has come to be termed the “Hillary Doctrine.” Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women’s rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women’s rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design.

Section: The Hillary Doctrine and Anti-american Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the Hillary Doctrine

Political Research Quarterly

Zaihra

Fidler

2017

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“…Additionally, it highlights the important role political institutions play in shaping religious violence and religious politics more broadly. While religious beliefs matter, it is their political context that determines religion's impact on society and its form, whether violent or peaceful (Philpott 2007;Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011;Saiya 2015Saiya , 2018Saiya and Scime 2015;Henne 2017;Saiya and Fidler 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weapon of the Strong? Government Support for Religion and Majoritarian Terrorism

Henne

Journal of Conflict Resolution

Hand

2020

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This article addresses a puzzle in terrorism studies. That terrorism functions as a “weapon of the weak” is conventional wisdom among terrorism researchers. When it comes to religious communities, however, often it is those groups favored by the state—rather than repressed minority communities—that commit acts of terrorism. We argue that this is because official religious favoritism can empower and radicalize majority communities, leading them to commit more and more destructive terrorist attacks. We test this claim using a statistical analysis of Muslim-majority countries. Our findings support the idea that the combination of state support of religion and discrimination against minorities encourages terrorism from majority religious groups.

“…The first involves straightforward repression by the state which is met by resistance on the part of targeted groups. 21 When states or societies restrict religious practice, they inevitably make religion a source of conflict insofar as these restrictions are targeted at a primary source of peoples' identities and are often interpreted as an affront to their very being. 22 At the very least, religious restrictions engender feelings of resentment on the part of the victims towards the perpetrators of these policies, thus contributing to a common narrative of disenfranchisement among those being repressed.…”

Section: Domestic Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

The religious freedom peace

The International Journal of Human Rights

2015

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Around the world, religion's influence on societies and politics is increasing. Arguably religion is today a more salient feature of international politics than at any point in the last 300 years. Yet this increase in religion's prominence comes at the precise time that religious expression has come under unprecedented assault from both state actions and communal hostilities involving religion. At the same time, religious extremism and violence have also been on the rise globally. This article makes the case that these two trends -repression of religion and resistance on the part of believers -are intertwined. Here, I survey four forms of violence: domestic religious terrorism, international religious terrorism, religious civil wars and interstate conflicts. In each case, I outline different pathways through which restrictions on religion lead to violence, marshal data derived and coded from conflict databases, and present brief case studies showing how states that hinder religious freedom are disproportionately more likely to both experience and give rise to all four forms of violence. On the other hand, religiously free countries are far less susceptible to and do not encourage religious violence. The article concludes with some recommendations for policy.