Religion and International Confict

Chapter 5

1. Introduction

Chapter 2 reviewed some of the writings on religion and confict. We argued that the attempt to use religious factors to explain “religious confict” is both logically tautological and empirically misleading. Consequently, our focus in this chapter is on general forms of international confict, regard-less of precipitating issue(s). Te questions we pose do not concern when a confict becomes “religious” but rather what kind of factors afect the pro-pensity of states to engage in confict with other states, what kind of factors increase or decrease the propensity of states to fght each other, and what factors increase or decrease the level of regional conficts.

Specifcally, this chapter addresses the following questions:

1. Which particular characteristics of states determine their propen-sity to engage in international conficts? Specifcally, how do the religious characteristics of states and their environment afect the scope, timing, and nature of their involvement in international conficts?

2. How do the religious characteristics of states determine whom they fght? Specifcally, which religious characteristics of states determine how they select enemies?

3. How do the religious characteristics of regions afect the confict levels in them?

4. Do religious factors afect the characteristics of confict, such as their duration, the likelihood of escalation, and their outcomes?

In chapter 3 we discussed in rather general terms the ways in which var-ious theories address the relationship between religvar-ious factors and inter-national confict. In this chapter we provide a more in-depth theoretical and empirical focus on this linkage. Empirical research on the relationship between religion and international confict was minimal for many years.

Te emergence of the CoC thesis, and even more so the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, stimulated a signifcant number of empirical studies on these issues. Results, however, have been mixed, at best, refecting sub-stantial disagreement on whether and to what extent religious factors afect the outbreak and characteristics of international conficts.

We believe that such disagreements are due to weaknesses of the case-study and quantitative literatures on the subject. Accordingly, we employ several alternative approaches and data that help us provide a clearer picture of this linkage. We also build on recent empirical research on the relation-ship between religious factors and international confict. We aim to inno-vate in several important respects.

First, we draw upon a broader range of perspectives and ideas than pre-vious studies. Much of the empirical literature on the linkages between reli-gious factors and international confict focused on the arguments of the CoC thesis. Our approach relies on more nuanced ideas concerning the possible efects that religion may exert on international confict. Some of the propositions we derive from the theories articulated in chapter 3 are diferent from, and broader than those that have been examined in previ-ous studies. Tests of these hypotheses enable us to provide a more nuanced and balanced assessment of various theories linking religion to international confict.

Second, we base our analyses on far more comprehensive and nuanced data than previous studies on both the factors that afect international confict and on the characteristics of such conficts. Our data contain high-resolution information on religion, international confict, and a set of control variables related to our theory. On religion, the WRP dataset enables us to develop sophisticated measures of the religious characteristics of states, dyads, and entire regions. It allows us to quantify the degree of religious similarity and diversity within societies and between societies with a wide range of measures, some of them of very high resolution, and some of them more generic and coarse. Tese data that measure the religious demography of states, dyads, and regions are supplemented by additional

data on the relationship between political institutions and states, and by data concerning the political stability of regimes, adapted from other data sources. Tese data lead to a wide range of analyses assessing the empirical support for various hypotheses that are derived from our theory, as well as from the other perspectives we discussed in chapter 3. On the confict side of the equation, we build on a newly expanded, cleaned, and updated dataset on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) (Maoz et al. 2018) that allows a set of systematic analyses covering more states, dyads, and regions than most previous empirical forays into the relationship between religion and international confict.

Tird, the scope of the current study is signifcantly wider and the prob-ing of the possible religion-confict linkages is signifcantly deeper than previous forays into this subject. We examine multiple units of analysis, including the state-year, the state-history, the dyad-year, the dyad-history, and the regional level. At each level we examine diferent aspects of religion-confict relations. As we show below, the theoretical perspectives we dis-cussed in chapter 3 have diferent predictions about which specifc aspects of the religious characteristics of states, dyads, or regions afect which types of confict behavior. Tese multilevel analyses of the religion-confict nexus enable a more nuanced assessment of the relative validity of the diferent theoretical perspectives with respect to the efect of religion on interna-tional confict.

Fourth, we ofer several methodological innovations that help overcome biases, problems, and errors that pervaded many of the previous studies on the subject. Here, too, we believe that our results enable more cred-ible inferences regarding the questions under study. Taken together, these analyses move the empirical study of religion and international confict well beyond what was done and known in the past.

Tis chapter is organized as follows. In the next section we review the empirical literature that addresses the efect of religious factors on interna-tional confict. We provide a critical appraisal of this literature and identify some of the theoretical and methodological difculties associated with it.

In the third section, we outline the hypotheses derived from the various perspectives discussed in chapter 3 with respect to the religion-confict link-ages. Section 4 discusses the research design in general and nontechnical terms. A more detailed methodological exposition of the research design is provided in the appendix at the end of the chapter. Section 5 discusses the

results of the empirical analyses. In section 6 we provide a general assess-ment of the linkages between religion and confict across levels of analysis.

2. Religion and International Confict: A Review of the Empirical Literature

Much of the empirical study of religion and international confict was revived in the post–Cold War era, and much of it was due to the CoC thesis. While there were a few studies of the religion-international confict linkage in the preceding periods—and we discuss them below—not sur-prisingly, many recent empirical analyses have focused on testing the CoC thesis. Since we have reviewed the more general theoretical (and polemical) studies of religion and politics in previous chapters, this review focuses on empirical studies of religion and international confict.

Perhaps the frst systematic treatment of this subject was a set of studies by Lewis F. Richardson during the 1920s and 1930s. Tese studies were published posthumously in 1960. Analyzing more than 300 wars and dis-putes from 1820 to 1929, Richardson (1960) found that, in general, com-mon religion did not have a dampening efect on the incidence of war.

Tere appeared to be a relationship between religious dissimilarity and confict in the case of Christianity versus Islam (p. 245), but Christians were also very likely to fght each other (pp. 235–39). Te problem with the Richardson study has to do with its truncation of the population of cases. Like other studies of religion and confict—discussed in chapter 2—

Richardson ignored the opportunities for confict, that is, those cases in which confict did not occur.

Building on Richardson’s work, Henderson (1997, 1998) studied the relationship between religious, linguistic, and ethnic similarity for all state dyads and their involvement in international war from 1820 to 1989.

Utilizing the Cultural Composition of Interstate System Members dataset from COW (Singer 1997),¹ he found, inter alia, that religiously similar states were less likely to fght interstate wars against each other than reli-giously dissimilar states. Tese studies supported the view that “religion matters” in international confict—and over a long period of time extend-ing back to the early post-Napoleonic era. But given that the religious char-acteristics of states are similar to but not synonymous with Huntington’s civilizations, then they could go no further in either supporting or refuting

Huntington’s claims.² Moreover, these studies showed that while religious similarity exerted a confict-dampening impact on international war, eth-nic and linguistic similarity was found to increase the likelihood of war.

Terefore, with respect to international war, the impact of religion was opposite that of ethnicity and language, demonstrating that they did not operate as part of the cultural monolith suggested by Huntington’s termi-nology of “civilizations.”

Gartzke and Gleditsch (2006) provided an extensive analysis of the relationship between religion and international confict for the period 1950–2001. Teir analysis drew on a diferent dataset (Ellingsen 2000) and examined a broader range of international conficts, including MIDs, MIDs incurring battle deaths, and international wars. Teir results repli-cated Henderson’s main fndings regarding the role of religious similarity in international conficts. Tey also found that religious similarity exhibits opposite directional efects on international confict compared to ethnic and linguistic similarity. Finally, Gartzke and Gleditsch also found that dyads in which a religious majority in one state shared religious identity with a minority in another state were more likely to experience MIDs. Like the previous studies, these fndings converged with Huntington’s claims that religion was an important factor in world politics, but diverged from them by showing that this impact transcended the post–Cold War era.

In a study of the impact of religion on international war over the broad-est spatial temporal domain yet examined systematically (i.e., the period 1816–2001), Maoz (2006) found that religious polarization had a signif-cant impact on systemic confict, although the direction of its impact was not consistent across time and with respect to diferent measures of con-fict. Religious polarization was positively and signifcantly associated with MIDs in both the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Yet, it was posi-tively associated with wars during the nineteenth century but negaposi-tively associated with wars during the twentieth century. Religious polarization also had a positive efect on the duration of international confict during the nineteenth century, but was negatively associated with it in the twentieth.

In his fndings of a two-century impact of religion on international confict, Maoz’s (2006) fndings, like those of Richardson, Henderson, and Gartzke and Gleditsch, revealed that religion matters in world politics—and that it has for at least the last two centuries and into the present, but not in the way Huntington envisions it.

Additional studies that empirically test the CoC thesis on international conficts include Russett et al.’s (2000) study of MIDs from 1950 to 1992, and Henderson and Tucker’s (2001) analysis of international wars over the 1816–1992 period. Both studies found little if any support for the main claims of the CoC thesis. Similar disconfrming results emerged from sub-sequent systematic analyses of the CoC thesis (e.g., Chiozza 2002, Bolks and Stoll 2003), although there were a few exceptions (e.g. Tusicisny 2004, Charron 2010).³ Tus, while IR scholars have demonstrated an empiri-cal relationship between religion and international war, the main empiriempiri-cal claims of the CoC thesis—which these studies attempted to test—have not been consistently supported.

A somewhat diferent approach is used by Johns and Davies (2012).

Tese authors employ an experimental design to test the—seemingly competing—claims of the democratic peace and the CoC theses. Tey examine the attitudes of subjects toward hypothetical confict situations involving enemies that represent diferent regime types and diferent reli-gious afnities. Tey fnd that British respondents are more likely to sup-port the use of force against a dictatorship compared to a democracy, and that they are more likely to support the use of force against an Islamic enemy than against a Christian one. By contrast, American respondents’

attitude is driven entirely by Christianity. Non-religious and non-Christian American respondents are no more likely to endorse the use of force against Islamic enemies than against Christian ones. Tis ofers an interesting, albeit limited, take on the CoC thesis in that two largely similar publics in terms of religion and political culture show signifcantly diferent pro-pensities toward confict with religiously dissimilar enemies. However, the generalizability of an experimental study of this sort to real-world decision-making settings, or to broader cross-national settings is extremely limited.

Neumayer and Plümper (2009) test CoC-related hypotheses on inter-national terrorism. Tey argue that the CoC thesis suggests a greater pro-pensity for terrorism by Islamic perpetrators against non-Islamic targets.

An alternative explanation for Islamic terrorism is that target selection is based on the strategic value of Western states, in particular, their support of the home regimes of terrorists (or of groups within those home countries).

Tey fnd that the strategic model of international terrorism provides a bet-ter explanation of bet-terrorists’ choice of targets than the CoC thesis. However, they do fnd some support for the argument that the Islam versus the West

hypothesis is better supported in the post–Cold War era than during the Cold War period.

Te record of empirical investigations testing the CoC thesis is decid-edly mixed. On the one hand, the results suggesting that confict between religiously dissimilar states (Henderson 1997, 1998; Gartzke and Gleditsch 2006) may be seen as supportive evidence of this thesis. On the other hand, more direct analyses of the CoC thesis (Russett et al. 2000, Henderson and Tucker 2001, Chiozza 2002, Henderson 2005) suggest that there is not much evidence to support this thesis. Studies such as Neumayer and Plümper (2009) and Johns and Davies (2012) show that there is some over-lap between hypotheses deduced from the CoC argument and alternative explanations for target selection by terrorists, or public support for the use of force against religiously dissimilar states. Consequently, we have yet to establish with a sufcient degree of reliability whether the world has gone from a Cold War superpower ideological standof to a post–Cold War clash of civilizations. It may be that the answer to this question is neither defnite nor simple. However, another possibility is that the empirical research on the religion-confict nexus is marred by some signifcant theoretical and methodological problems. In fact, several issues with the empirical research of the CoC thesis stand out.

First, religious similarity is largely a function of how we measure reli-gion and of the level of aggregation at which this concept is measured. For example, European states would be coded as religiously similar if similarity is measured in terms of major religions, such as Christianity; however, dif-ferentiating among Christian religious families (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, or Orthodox) reveals much greater religious diversity. Te same applies to confict between various religious families in Islam.

Second, the studies we reviewed do not provide a consistent categoriza-tion scheme to determine the variability within and similarity across the worlds’ major religions. For example, Richardson’s (1960) analysis included thirteen religious groups. Te COW data (Singer 1997) included sixty religious groups, ranging from major religions to minor denominations.

Gartzke and Gleditsch’s (2006) study focused on six of the nine religious groups in Ellingsen’s (2000) data. Te range of empirical results suggests that we need a standard and systematic classifcation of religious groupings.

Tird, most studies focus on the dyadic level of aggregation. At this level of analysis we can provide answers to the question who fghts whom, when,

and (perhaps) why (Singer 1971: 63-4, Bremer 1992). Tis is an impor-tant level, but it is not clear that this level captures the various theoretical perspectives that claim a relationship between religious factors and interna-tional confict. Important arguments on the relationship between religious adherence, religious diversity, and religious identity, respectively, and the confict behavior of states, have rarely been systematically examined. For example, are religiously homogeneous states more or less confict prone than religiously heterogeneous states? Are states in which there is signif-cant religious discrimination more confict prone than states that practice formal freedom of religion and separation between religious and political institutions? Are states wherein the vast majority of the population practices a given religion (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Hinduism) more confict prone than states of other religious majorities?

Importantly, the CoC thesis’s focus is on changes in the pattern of major armed conficts during and after the Cold War. It is not evident that the dyadic level of analysis captures the logical import of this thesis. While dyadic analyses answer the question of who fghts whom and when, it focuses on the trees rather than on the forest, and the CoC thesis is about forests not just pairs of trees.

Fourth, the research design of most previous studies on the subject is marred by signifcant methodological problems. Tese may lead to biased inferences. Several issues are apparent. One, the religious characteristics of states and dyads are stable over time.⁴ Tis suggests that most studies that focus on a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) design sufer from stationar-ity bias because the religious characteristics of states and dyads typically vary little over time.⁵ By repeatedly analyzing the same dyads over time, analyses stack time invariant covariates on highly fuctuating outcome variables. Tis is likely to bias the resulting estimates and pose a major threat to inference. Another problem concerns the size of the population analyzed. With a very large number of cases, even a moderate or weak relationship becomes statistically signifcant. Even when some studies have used theoretical flters to reduce sample size,⁶ the resulting samples are in the tens of thousands of observations. Finally, the dependent variables (the outbreak or occurrence of conficts and wars) are extremely skewed: a small group of states or dyads are responsible for the vast majority of confict, and many states/dyads have experienced no confict involvement. Tis is also a source of bias in the results. We discuss these methodological issues at

greater length in the appendix to this chapter. Te general point, however, is that we need to fnd a way to fx these methodological problems in order to derive more reliable inferences regarding the relationship between reli-gion and international confict. And we need multiple robustness checks in order to have greater trust in our fndings and assessments of them.

Importantly, the focus of this literature on religion and international confict is quite narrow. Most of the empirical studies use the CoC thesis either as a source of their argument or as a foil. Tis often results in a lack of or rather superfcial specifcation of the causal mechanisms that link reli-gious factors to international confict. In this context, Henne’s (2012) study

Im Dokument Religious Sources of Confict and Cooperation in the Modern Era (Seite 157-200)