Religion, government coalitions, and terrorism

When ethnic minority parties are excluded from government coalitions, are group attributes such as religion related to the groups' use of political violence? We argue that extremist factions within minority groups make use of divergence in religion to mobilize support for violent action when the group is excluded from government. Thus, we posit that while religion per se is not a source of violence, extremist elements of ethnic minorities, whose religion differs from the majority, may use religious divergence to mobilize group members to perpetrate terrorism. Specifically we test the hypotheses that extremist factions of an excluded group will be more likely to carry out terrorist attacks when the group's members belong to a different religion as well as when they belong to a different denomination or sect of a religion than the majority. To test these propositions, we use data on ethnic minority party inclusion in government coalitions, ethnic minority group religion, and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) by matching perpetrators with ethnic groups for all democracies, 1970-2004. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Socially relevant ethnic groups, ethnic structure, and AMAR

Protracted conflicts over the status and demands of ethnic and religious groups have caused more instability and loss of human life than any other type of local, regional, and international conflict since the end of World War II. Yet we still have accumulated little in the way of accepted knowledge about the ethnic landscape of the world. In part this is due to empirical reliance on the limited data in the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project, whose selection biases are well known. In this article we tackle the construction of a list of ‘socially relevant’ ethnic groups meeting newly justified criteria in a dataset we call AMAR (A for All). We find that one of the principal difficulties in constructing the list is determining the appropriate level of aggregation for groups. To address this issue, we enumerate subgroups of the commonly recognized groups meeting our criteria so that scholars can use the subgroup list as one reference in the construction of the list of ethnic groups most appropriate for their study. Our conclusion outlines future work on the data using this expanded dataset on ethnic groups