ONE GOD FOR ALL: FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS … · Nil S. Satana Assistant Professor Bilkent...

ONE GOD FOR ALL:

FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS

AND TERRORISM

Jóhanna Kristín Birnir

Associate Professor

Department of Government

Center For International Development and Conflict Management

University of Maryland

0145 Tydings Hall

College Park MD, 20742

[email protected]

Nil S. Satana

Assistant Professor

Bilkent University

Department of International Relations

Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences

Bilkent 06800, Ankara, Turkey

[email protected]

Prepared for the annual meeting of the International Studies Association.

New Orleans, February 2010.

© Draft, please cite but don't quote.

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INTRODUCTION

In May 2002 a car bomb outside the Karachi Sheraton Hotel in Pakistan killed 16

people. In June that same year three Islamic militants were sentenced to death for the

bombing. (Mickolus and Simmons, 2006). [In February 1994 a Zionist settler from Qiryat

Arba entered a mosque on the West Bank. He killed 29 and wounded 150 with an

automatic assault rifle, before being beaten to death.] (Ranstorp, 1996). In 1996 Erik

Rudolph, who has been linked to the Christian Identity Movement, set off a backpack

bomb at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, killing one and injuring 111 others. In

1997, he is alleged to have carried out a bombing at a family-planning clinic and a

nightspot frequented by lesbians (Eggen, 2005).

Such examples of terrorism seemingly motivated by religion are all too common.

Generally these instances involve purported representatives of religious minorities who

carry out an extreme act against some majority population. The apparent proliferation of

this „new‟ breed of terrorism (Newsweek, 1993) has spurred the development of a

substantial corresponding scholarly literature that aims to distinguish this „new terrorism‟

from older types and explain why the two differ (Hoffman, 1998; Kibble, 2002; Azzam,

2005; Wiktorowicz, 2006; Dobrot, 2007; Hegghammer, 2006; Schmid, 2004; Morgan,

2004; Rapoport, 2002). In contrast, some of the most prominent experts in the literature on

terrorism argue that the idea of a new type of religious terrorism is misleading. Broadly

speaking they maintain that a closer examination of the goals, structure and means of

terrorist organizations perpetrating this „new‟ terrorism reveal a pattern akin to the 'old'

terrorist organizations more active before the 1990s (Crenshaw, 2000, 2005, 2006;

Duyvesteyn, 2004). Furthermore, this literature critiques studies that find causes for

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violence within a particular religion, and point out that violent acts are perpetrated by

adherents of most if not all religions worldwide (Hadden and Shupe, 1991; Crenshaw

2006).

Given the dearth of cross national data on religious motivations of terrorist incidents

to date, most of the literature on the topic of religion and terrorism is in the form of

qualitative analysis of one or a handful of cases with little cross national empirical testing.

This paper contributes to the literature by first considering theoretical arguments that take

into account the empirical observation that terrorist violence is common to many if not all

religions. More specifically drawing on Almond et al. (2003) and the Fundamentalist

Project, we posit that it is not content of religious doctrine per se that matters but rather

whether the religious setting includes religious fundamentalist elements, which aim to

make their particular worldview predominate. Furthermore, in line with Birnir and Şatana

(2007), we suggest that the strategic interests of fundamentalist majorities are at least as

likely to lead to situations of conflict as the strategic interests of fundamentalist minorities.

Second, using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and composite variables on religious

identities, we empirically test the idea that religious identities diverge in their impact on

terrorist violence. Moreover, using original quantitative data on fundamentalism we

empirically test the notion that fundamentalist groups, irrespective of creed, are associated

with higher incidents of terrorism than their non-fundamentalist counterparts. Our results

clearly confirm the idea that by and large religious doctrine is a poor predictor of terrorist

violence. Fundamentalism does, however, emerge as a strong and consistent predictor of

terrorist violence for majorities and minorities alike. Thus, our findings show no support

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for the growing new terrorism literature, which emphasizes religious doctrine in general

and Islam in particular as the primary emerging cause in terrorism of the new era.

We would like to note at the outset, and later we discuss in greater detail, that this

paper is work in progress. Consequently, while we have good reason to believe our

findings are indicative of the true underlying relationships, the data collection and

empirical analysis are not complete (as explained in greater detail later) and all of the

subsequent analysis is preliminary.

THE LITERATURE

The general literature on religion and conflict is deeply concerned about the rise of

religious violence. Juergensmeyer (2003) argues that religious violence is on the rise

globally. He argues that a common culture of violence fosters religious violence in the

communities of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism. The most

important aspect of this common culture of violence is that the rebels often perceive

themselves and their way of life under attack. When this kind of worldview combines with

other historical and circumstantial factors, Juergensmeyer finds that there is an “odd

attraction between religion and violence” (p. 14, 240). Huntington (1996) predicts a clash

of civilizations in the international system in the post-Cold War era. Religion is a part of

the definition of civilization along with language and culture. Along similar lines, Jelen

and Wilcox (2002: 16) suggest that “the similarities and differences between creeds in

pluralistic religious settings may provide some insight as to the sources and nature of

religious conflicts.”1 Others agree that the content of religion directly or indirectly

produces conflicts (Seul, 1999; Stark, 2001; Fox, 2000, 2002, 2004; Rashid, 2002).2 One

idea, for example, is that monotheism poses particular difficulties for peace (Stark 2001;

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Jelen and Wilcox, 2002). It is important to note that the above authors do not argue that

politics involving religion are necessarily conflictual. For instance, Fox (2002) argues that

religion becomes a salient political issue only when the group harbors desires for autonomy

or independence.3 Seul (1999) and Fox (2002) also state that religion provides a

framework that helps people understand the world around them. Fox then goes on to argue

that when challenged, the reality provided by this framework must be defended.

Furthermore, he suggests that religious frameworks provide codes of conduct for adherents.

In some cases, these codes are even thought to require conflictual behavior by followers.

Both Seul and Fox agree that religious institutions may facilitate conflict and Fox adds that

religious authority grants the conflict legitimacy. Stark (2001: 367, 376) further

underscores the strength of world-shaping view of religion.

This concern about religion as the root cause of violence is echoed in the literature

that focuses more specifically on terrorism. Because terrorist groups and terrorism are

poorly defined and in controversial terms both in the literature and in common discourse

(Feldman and Peralta 2004, Walzer 2002, Stohl 1988) it is important to define our use of

the term before proceeding further. This paper follows Crenshaw‟s (1972) definition,

which states that: “(1) Terrorism is part of a revolutionary strategy - a method used by

insurgents to seize political power from an existing government. (2) Terrorism is

manifested in acts of socially and politically unacceptable violence. (3) There is a

consistent pattern of symbolic or representative selection of the victims or objects of acts of

terrorism. (4) The revolutionary movement deliberately intends these actions to create a

psychological effect on specific groups and thereby to change their political behavior and

attitudes." (p. 385). Returning to the concern about religion as the root cause of violence in

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the literature on terrorism, Rapoport (1984: 673), for example, compared three religious

terrorist groups of Hindu, Muslim and Judaist faith, and found that „sacred terror‟ had

common characteristics even though these three religions were fundamentally different.

Furthermore, Rapoport (2002) argues that the period after 9/11 is the period of the religious

wave in four waves of terrorism, also including the „anarchist wave,‟ „anti-colonial wave,‟

and the „new left wave‟ Similarly, Hoffman (1998) argues that although leftist and ethno-

national terrorism have been very destructive, religion is the most important terrorist

motivator today. Morgan (2004) adds that old terrorism was politically motivated as

opposed to religiously motivated new terrorism.

Importantly, however, one strand of the terrorism literature also diverges from the

main-stream literature on religion and conflict (conventional and terrorist) in its emphasis

on Islamic terrorism. Hoffman (1993), for example, finds that Islam is a prominent cause

of terrorism and argues that „holy terror‟ will be the most dangerous type of violence in the

new millennium. Rapoport (2002: 424) posits that religious transcendence of state

boreders is particularly important for Islam since Sunnis are dispersed among many states

and religious beliefs are quite strong in all. Rapoport, for example, ties the September 11

attacks to this very fact. Kibble (2002) also argues that Islamic fundamentalism is what

lead to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a more moderate form of Islam is needed to solve the

clash between the West and the Muslim world. Azzam (2005) finds a connection between

Wahhabi Islam and rise of militant Islam. He connects the very nature of Wahhabism to

religious fundamentalism. According to Azzam, Al Qaeda of Saudi origin is Wahhabist

thus anti-Christian and anti-Jewish in its very nature. Wiktorowicz (2006), on the other

hand, argues that the Salafi Movement (also referred to as Wahhabis) has factions that

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differ greatly in motivation and in action. It is the jihadis that can be tied to violence and

not the purists and politicos. Thus, the author recommends that the two non-violent Salafi

groups should be allied with by the West against the jihadis, which is in line with Kibble‟s

recommendations. Dobrot (2007) posits three causes of Islamist terrorism: „the lack of

wealth-sharing in Islamic countries, resentment of Western exploitation of Islamic

countries, and a U.S. credibility gap within the Islamic community.‟ Thus he agrees with

Hoffman that Islam is indeed an underlying cause of global terrorism. Furthermore,

Hegghammer (2006) argues that Iraqi invasion of the U.S. increased global jihadist

terrorism because the invasion increased the ideological development of Islamist militants

as it increased frustration in the Muslim world towards the West.

Operationalizing the effects of divergent religions on terrorism for testing along the

lines of this strand of the literature we posit that it is possible that Sunni Muslims, for

example, are likely to consider the Muslim sect of of Shi‟iism less incompatible with their

world view than with a more divergent worldview such as Christian Catholicism.

Although there are significant differences between the practices and perceptions of the

Sunni and the Shi‟i Muslims, the fundamental building blocks within the religious family

of Islam (i.e., a single god, Allah and a single prophet, Mohammad) are common for both

sects. However, the building blocks of Christianity (i.e., the Trinity) significantly differ

from Islam. Similarly, according to this idea, the Catholic and Protestant branches of

Christianity are less likely to perceive their “world order” under attack from each other

than from other religious families that are fundamentally different from Christianity.4 If

this is true then we expect that in any given country:

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H1. The probability of terrorist attack is higher between two groups whose religions are

from different families than between two groups who belong to the same family of

religions.

Countering this idea of new Islamic terrorism, Crenshaw (2005) argues that

examination of the goals, organization and means of new and old terrorism shows that new

terrorism is not new in terms of redefinition of these three criteria but in degrees of them.

Crenshaw (1981, 1995) argues that terrorism is caused by „psychological considerations

and internal bargaining, as well as by reasoned or strategic reactions to opportunities and

constraints, perceived in light of the organization‟s goals.‟ Crenshaw (2006) further

criticizes the new terrorism literature that underemphasizes political and social causes of

terrorist violence and blames terrorism on religion. Specifically she points out that

religious extremism is not monopolized by Islam but shared by other religions. Similarly,

Duyvesteyn (2004) counters the juxtaposition of new and old terrorism. Duyvesteyn agrees

that one of the main motivations of new terrorism is religion and fanaticism but points out

that older types of terrorism were not areligious, either. Furthermore, Duyvesteyn believes

that national and territorial characteristics still play an important role in contemporary

terrorism.

Furthermore, Pape (2005) argues that religious extremism is not a good variable to

predict terrorism because the terrorists are rational and they carry out violent attacks for

clear strategic objectives. Rather he posits that terrorists try to get modern democracies to

withdraw forces from the territories that the terrorists view as their homeland.

Consequently, Pape finds that the literature that links Islam to terrorism is fundamentally

wrong. In fact, Pape‟s data show that the world leader in suicide terrorist attacks is the Sri

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Lankan Tamil Tigers, not an Islamist terrorist organization such as Hezbollah. Other cases

confirm this assesment. For example, since 1994 Sunni Muslim Kurds have carried out

tens of suicide attacks against Sunni Muslim Turks in Turkey. As the two groups belong to

the same family of religion explanations that center on religious doctrine as a cause for

Kurdish suicide attacks clearly fail to explain the case of Turkey.5

How then are we to reconcile these two observations that religious violence is

currently employed as a prominent motivator of terrorist violence but this method of

motivation is common to many religions? A possible solution presented by Almond et al.

(2003) and the five-volume Fundamentalism Project, is that it is not content of religion per

se that matters but rather whether the religious setting includes religious fundamentalist

elements that aim to make their particular worldview against modernity predominate. The

scholars participating in this project define fundamentalism as a “discernible pattern of

religious militancy by which self-styled „true believers‟ attempt to arrest the erosion of

religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable

alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors” (Almond et al. 2003: 17). They posit

that in democracies fundamentalist religious strategy is “designed first in order to create a

„defensive perimeter‟ and later as a mode of enlarging the hold over civil society, with the

hope of achieving hegemony there.” Almond et al. suggest that the source of conflict is

first the fundamentalist minority‟s fight for survival and second the majority's fear of losing

hegemony.

Bruce (2000) also posits that fundamentalism is on the rise because of the effects of

modernization on social, cultural and individual values of different societies. Thus he

offers a structural clue as to what distinguishes between Islamic and Protestant

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fundamentalisms because Protestant fundamentalism generally takes place in democratic

settings such as the U.S. where the fundamentalists become a pressure group within the

political and social system. Islamic fundamentalists, on the other hand, are often active in

non-democracies where the only way of existence for fundamentalists may be to overturn

the system and to establish their own. In such instances violence is an expected corollary

of fundamentalism.

There is support in the literature for the idea that cutting across religions,

fundamentalism plays a role in motivating religious violence in general and terrorism in

particular (Emerson and Hartman, 2006). Hadden and Shupe (1998), for example, note that

fundamentalism is not in the domain of Islam only. They argue that fundamentalism is a

way for people to deal with changing values of the modern world, thus globalization is the

major cause of fundamentalist movements all over the world. Juergensmeyer (1995: 353)

argues in the Fundamentalism Project that „antiFundamentalism‟ is dangerous because it

can be used to justify human rights abuses and limitation of civil liberties in an effort to

„stop fundamentalism before it spreads.‟ Schmid (2004) conceptualizes motives of

terrorism in various ways such as criminal, political, tool for warfare, communication and

religious fundamentalism. Schmid does not necessarily link terrorism to religious

fundamentalism as he thinks secular terrorism is a wide-spread phenomenon but he does

not dismiss religious fundamentalism as a cause of terrorism either (p. 210). Schmid also

notes that Juergensmeyer (2003) shows how religious fundamentalism can indeed lead to

terrorism because of the concept of martyrdom in religion – which is quite different than

secular terrorism. According to a quantitative study by Enders and Sandler (2006) “today‟s

fundamentalist terrorists are members of all the major religions; however, the primary force

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is Islam (Hoffman 1998; White 2003). [Furthermore, since] the rise of fundamentalist

terrorism, the proportion of incidents with deaths or injuries has increased greatly” (p. 47).

The difference between the implications of the literature that emphasizes

fundamentalism as a cause of terrorism and the other strands in the literature that pinpoint

particular religious doctrine as the root cause is quite significant. Most importantly,

according to the fundamentalist perspective any particular religious group is no more or

less likely to engage any other particular religious group in conflict. For example, the

worldview of Muslims is not particularly incompatible with that of Christians, Hindus or

Jews. Rather the answer to our question of how religion affects conflict comes down to the

probability of cooperation. If the objective of a particular group is to change the dominant

worldview and who controls that worldview, this group is more likely to engage other

groups in conflict - no matter weather the other group includes a fundamentalist element or

not. It bears clarifying that we consider "worldview" to be synonymous to political order

and posit that these are strategic considerations rather than more esoteric ones. This tension

between opposing strategic political objectives might result in terrorism in multiple ways.

For example, a fundamentalist majority might antagonize and threaten a minority to such

an extent that the minority resort to terrorism to drive off the majority advances. The

majority might even support terrorist attacks against a minority within its borders.

Conversely, a fundamentalist minority might initiate terrorism against a majority or another

minority in the same country in an effort to spread its worldview. At a minimum, the

particulars of the religion do not matter but the method of motivation does, we propose that

in any given country:

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H2. The presence of a religious fundamentalist faction in a minority or a majority group

increases the probability of terrorist conflict between these groups.

TESTING

The study of terrorism is not new and cross national empirical testing of the causes

of terrorism across cases is emerging. This includes most prominently a number of studies

that examine the causes of suicide terrorism (Pape, 2005; Asal, 2006; Berman and Laitin,

2005; Hafez, 2006; Moghadam, 2006; Horowitz, 2006; Wade and Reiter, 2007). Others

have examined the effect of economic globalization on the number of transnational terrorist

incidents (Li and Schaub, 2004) and the effect of regime type on transnational terrorism

(Li, 2005). Supporting prior analysis of Crenshaw (1981) and Taylor (1988), Krueger and

Maleckova (2003) use quantitative data to show that terrorists are as likely to be educated

and wealthy as un-educated and poor. Enders and Sandler (2006) find no quantitative

evidence of an income based post-9/11 transfer of attacks to low-income countries except

for attacks with U.S. casualties, but do find that there is a significant transference to the

Middle East and Asia where U.S. interests are, at times, attacked.

However, while Fox (2002) examines the general effect of religion on conventional

violence against the state the effects of divergent religions on terrorism remains mostly in

the domain of qualitative case studies. The same is true for the effect of fundamentalism.

Indeed, the only empirical analysis that we are aware of that explicitly aims to account for

the effect of fundamentalism does so by assuming we are now in an era of fundamentalist

terrorism and denotes this effect as an intercept shift “starting with the 4 November

takeover of the US embassy in Teheran” (Enders and Sandler, 2006:81).

The Research Design

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The question we ask in this paper is what effect religious differences and religious

fundamentalism have on terrorist incidents within a country‟s borders? The ideal research

design would account for all possible configurations of groups, their religious affiliations

and fundamentalist elements in those religions. We would then like to match each group

up with every terrorist incident, separating between intra-state and inter-state

(transnational) terrorism. Finally, through the use of multiple regression we would

compare violent groups to non-violent ones on the dimensions on religious families and

fundamentalism while holding a number of other important elements constant. The current

version of this paper falls short of the ideal as outlined below. Nonetheless, as we also

explain we have made sufficient progress to be confident that the basic results we show

here are not likely to change as we gather additional data – the details of the story,

however, will be better fleshed out in subsequent versions.

The appropriate universe of cases for this project contains all religious groups in the

population of independent countries in the world. For a catalog of all groups we rely on the

new lists of groups in the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project (Birnir and Wilkenfeld, 2007).

In this project a list is collected of all groups world-wide that meet the below criteria in

countries with a population of at least ½ million inhabitants in 2007:

1 Membership in the group is determined primarily by descent by both members and

non-members.

a) The group may be a caste if membership is determined by descent and

precludes public social mobility.

2 Membership in the group is recognized and viewed as important by members and/or

non-members. The importance may be psychological, normative, and/or strategic.

3 Members share some distinguishing cultural features, such as common language,

religion, occupational niche, and customs.

4 One or more of these cultural features are either practiced by a majority of the

group or preserved and studied by a set of members who are broadly respected by

the wider membership for so doing.

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5 The group has at least 100,000 members or constitutes one percent of a country‟s

population.

The total number of groups that meet the above criteria is around 1300. The basic design

of the research in this paper includes all of these groups. The current sample we analyze is

curtailed due to uncertainties about the independent variable of fundamentalism but we do

not anticipate that the full data will fundamentally alter the general conclusions we reach in

this paper for reasons explained below. Furthermore, the longitudinal research design in

this paper calls for matching each of these groups up with terrorist incidents they have

perpetrated each year. We have begun matching and future versions of this paper will

complete this work, we are less certain about the effects of matching.

Dependent variables:

Our dependent variables come from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) covering

59503 terrorist incidents from 1970-1997. The database codes intra and interstate terrorism

by perpetrator, location and year in addition to information describing the attack further. In

this version of the paper we use three dependent variables. First we counted the overall

number of terrorist attacks perpetrated in a given year in a particular country. Furthermore,

by country and year we counted the number of successful and unsuccessful attacks. An

attack is successful when it is carried out in full, while an unsuccessful attack is prevented

before it results in violence. Finally, we created a simple dummy variable accounting for

whether there were any terrorist attacks in a given country in a given year.

Independent Variables:

The independent variables of interest, accounting for differences in group religion

and religious fundamentalism, are original data. Our collection of these data is a work in

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progress. We have finished the coding of religious differences but would like to code a

second fundamentalism variable for reasons of case selection.

Religious differences.

For minority groups we coded the following religious families: Islam (with Sunni,

Shi‟i, Ibadhi sects), Christianity (with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican,

Independent sects), Baha‟ism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Yazidism, Judaism, Buddhism,

Animism, Taoism and Shinto. We code Methodism as a movement in Christian

Protestantism; Pentecostalism and Letter Day Saints (Mormons) as movements in the

Christian Independent sect. We also have a variable for non-religious minority groups.

The religious families coded for majority groups: Islam (with Sunni, Shi‟i, Ibadhi sects),

Christianity (with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican, Independent sects), Hinduism,

Judaism, Buddhism, Animism, Taoism, Shinto. Also, we code Methodism as a movement

in Christian Protestantism; Pentecostalism as a movement in the Christian Independent

sect.

Our sources for this variable are the World Factbook (www. cia.org) for majorities

and the Joshua Project (www.joshuaproject.com), Library of Congress and World

Directory of Minorities (1997) for minorities from 1945 to 2007. Indigenous / traditional /

ethnic beliefs in African states mentioned in these sources are entered as „Animism‟

following the U.S. Department of State web site on country studies, and the data set we

assembled for an earlier paper (Birnir and Şatana, 2007). Finally, we cross-checked against

alternative sources and local web sites to confirm the minority religion.

Fundamentalism.

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In coding fundamentalism we relied on Almond et al. and the Fundamentalism

Project volumes. They define fundamentalism as a “discernible pattern of religious

militance by which self-styled „true believers‟ attempt to arrest the erosion of religious

identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to

secular institutions and behaviors” (Almond et al. 2003: 17). Both majority and minority

groups in a country can contain fundamentalist elements and this is irrespective of religious

family to which the majority and minority belong. In many cases, however, neither the

majority nor the minority group contains fundamentalist elements, and Almond et al.

describe fundamentalism as a “rare phenomenon.” In the sample of all groups from 1970-

1997 we coded two fundamentalist variables.6 The first variable accounts for whether the

majority religion contains a fundamentalist element with reference to majority religions in

other countries that do not have a fundamentalist element. The second variable accounts

for whether the minority religion contains a fundamentalist element with respect to

minority religions that do not. To clarify, the operationalization of these variables depends

on our reading of all of the individual cases in the fundamentalist project. If, using the

above definition, the author of the particular case makes the argument that a minority or a

majority contains or does not contain a fundamentalist faction we code the groups

accordingly.

To our knowledge, the Fundamentalism Project volumes discuss all

fundamentalist movements that fit the controversial definition of religious fundamentalism

set out by the project. Since there are differing and debatable definitions of

fundamentalism, we preferred to use one definition and one source for this variable.7

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The problem, however, is that the fundamentalist project does not define explicitly the

universe of cases that were selected for the project. Consequently, we cannot be certain

that the project identifies all fundamentalist religious groups and, therefore, cannot code

religious groups that are not discussed in the project as lacking a fundamentalist element.

Assuming that the Fundamentalist project does not identify all religious fundamentalist

groups the concern becomes one of selection bias. Possibly the project contains only the

most prominent fundamentalist groups while fundamentalist groups that are less visible are

left out. If this is the case the analysis is unreliable if left out groups differ systematically

in their propensity for violence from groups that are included. Our cursory survey suggests

that not many fundamentalist groups were excluded from the project. Second, we are not

particularly concerned that groups that possibly were left out differ significantly from

groups in the sample because many of the fundamentalist groups discussed in the

Fundamentalist project are small and not violent.

The second concern about selection bias is that if there truly is a positive

relationship between fundamentalism and terrorist violence and we leave out most of the

cases that are not fundamentalist – we have effectively over-selected cases with a high

value on the dependent variable. Consequently, we will tend to have a disproportionate

number of cases that, because of other variables unrelated to the independent variable we

are examining, were high on the dependent variable of terrorism. The well known result is

that the true relationship between fundamentalism and terrorist violence would be flattened

and harder to detect (Geddes 2003, Shively 2006). As the results show this is not a

problem for detecting the effect of fundamentalism but serves as a caution against reading

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anything into the magnitude of the coefficients other than their signs and size relative to

each other.

Control Variables

Due to the dearth of cross national empirical analysis of the causes of religious

terrorism it is not clear precisely what the most appropriate controls for these equations

should be.8 Presumably, however, ongoing conflicts are more likely to produce continued

attacks than situations where terrorism has never been used. Consequently, we begin by

including a lag of the dependent variable on the right hand side of the first two equations to

account for autocorrelation. It is not likely, however, that the third dependent variable –

number of successful terrorist attacks carried out in a particular country in a given year – is

as dependent on the preceding number of successful attacks as it is on the total number of

attacks carried out in the same year. However, the two variables; total number of attacks

and the number of successful attacks are highly correlated (over 0.9). Consequently, in the

equation that has as its dependent variable number of successful attacks we include, on the

right hand side, a variable accounting for the total number of terrorist attacks carried out in

a particular country in the previous year. Furthermore, the extant wealth of case studies

informs us that country specific conditions are instrumental to the onset, number, and

success of terror attacks. Therefore, all of the below analyses include country fixed effects.

The Methods

The dependent variables determine the method used in each case and we also run

Ordinary Least Squares Regression for each equation to probe robustness to alternate

methods of analysis. The first dependent variable, annual count of terror incidents per

country is a count variable. The number of incidents runs from 0 to 778 attacks in a single

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year. The average is 43.66 and the standard deviation is 12.47. Poisson is the appropriate

form of estimation for count variables if the mean and variance of the dependent variable

are approximately equal (Long & Freese, 2001). The incident count variable is clearly

more dispersed than that. Therefore, we use Negative Binomial Regression to assess the

effect of the independent variables on the count outcome, the number of terror incidents

perpetrated in a country in a given year.

The second dependent variable, presence of any terrorist incidents in a given

country in a given year is a binomial variable. Consequently, we assess the effects of the

independent variables using Logit regression. The third dependent variable, number of

successful terror attacks in a year is also an over-dispersed count variable and we estimate

the effects with a negative binomial regression.

RESULTS

Table one shows the effects of religion on the number of terrorist attacks

perpetrated in a country in any given year between 1970 and 1997. The first specification

includes independent variables accounting for majority and minority religious family as

well as majority and minority fundamentalism. In addition this specification contains

control variables that account for the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated in the prior

year to account for possible autocorrelation of violence in addition to country dummies

whose coefficients are excluded due to space constraints. The second specification is

identical to the first but the estimation technique is different.

According to Table one religious family constellation of a country has no

systematic effect on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated in that country in a given

year. Because of sign changes, the only variables denoting any significance of religious

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family are unreliable between estimation techniques and must, therefore, be interpreted as

not having any clear relationship with the dependent variables. Interestingly however, both

minority and majority fundamentalism are associated with increased numbers of terrorist

attack. Notably the effect of majority fundamentalism is at least triple that of minority

fundamentalism. As expected, prior terrorist violence is an excellent indicator of

subsequent terrorist violence as are many of the country fixed effects.

[Insert Table 1 about here]

Table two shows the effects of religious family and fundamentalism on the

probability that a country experience any terrorist violence in a given year. Controlling for

violence in a prior year and country fixed effects the results suggest that countries with

Islamic and Hindu majorities are less likely to experience any terrorist violence. The

significance of the variable accounting for Islamic majorities is not, however, robust to the

arguably more correct estimation technique. Interestingly, Hindu majorities seem less

likely to experience terrorist violence but it is possible that the India country dummy was

dropped due to collinearity with this variable so that this result is only picking up the effect

of India. In general, dropping of country fixed effects was a problem when using the more

intensive estimation techniques. This suggests that regional fixed effects may be more

appropriate than country effects and that we need to examine in detail findings that suggest

a particularly religious combination has an effect on terrorism until we verify that this

result is not simply driven by a single country.

Again, minority fundamentalism is significantly and robustly associated with

increase in terrorist violence whereas the same is only true for fundamentalist majorities in

the specification analyzed using Logit.

20


The third table accounts for the number of successful terrorist attacks perpetrated in

a given country in a particular year. Again the same pattern emerges with respect to

religious family – showing that religious family of neither the majority nor the minority

matters for the number of successful terrorist attacks carried out in a given country in a

particular year. The presence of a fundamentalist majority does, however, increase the

number of successful attacks whereas the presence of a fundamentalist minority has little

effect on the success of terrorist attacks.


CONCLUSION

In addition to the fact that the sample likely over-represents fundamentalist groups

(violent and non-violent ones) it is important to remember that current runs include both

intra and interstate terrorist violence. Furthermore, terrorist incidents have not been

matched with groups so that the coding currently holds all groups accountable for violence

perpetrated in a particular country. It is not clear that this last coding convention sways the

results one way or another because it is just as likely that this increases the number of non-

fundamentalist groups inaccurately “held responsible” for violent attacks as it is that

fundamentalist groups are inaccurately “credited with” with violent attacks perpetrated by

others. Nonetheless, for theoretical clarity in subsequent versions of the paper we intend to

separate out intra vs. inter state terrorism, and for empirical clarity to match incidents with

particular groups.

What we can say about these results is that it seems pretty evident that religious

family orientation of minority and majority groups has no systematic effect across nations

21

on the presence or number of terrorist attacks carried out in a particular country. This

finding is consistent with a prior paper on motivations of ethnic minority rebellion against

the state where we found no systematic effect of divergence in majority minority religious

family orientation (Birnir and Şatana, 2007).

To the contrary, it also seems clear that fundamentalism, irrespective of doctrine,

matters for terrorism. Majority fundamentalism is significantly associated with an

increasing number of terrorist incidents as is minority fundamentalism, though that effect is

considerably smaller. Furthermore, minority fundamentalism is significantly associated

with the presence of any terrorist incident and majority fundamentalism may be as well

although that is less clear. These findings are also consistent with our prior work where we

found that fundamentalist elements in the majority or minority religion significantly

increase the probability that a minority engage in violent rebellion against the state (Birnir

and Şatana, 2007).

The fact that these results are in line with our prior findings that fundamentalist

groups are associated with presence and greater number of conventional violence incidents

against the state is not all-together surprising as one might expect that groups who use

violence strategically will employ many different types of violence and may graduate from

using one type of violence to another when the first type outlives its usefulness or is not

practical for logistical reasons. To gauge the accuracy of this conjecture we examined the

sample of minority group rebellion against fundamentalism and Memorial Institute for the

Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) and Department of Homeland Security Terrorism

Knowledge Database terrorism indicators. Interestingly we found that the average level of

rebellion against the state among non-fundamentalist minority groups is .475, the average

22

level of rebellion against the state among fundamentalist groups is 1.266, and the average

level of rebellion among fundamentalist groups that also engage in terrorist activities is

2.180.9

To conclude, therefore, it seems clear that doctrine simply is not a good predictor of

violence. Fundamentalism, however, is a strong consistent predictor but the precise

reasons for why this is the case remain the topic of future research.

23

Table 1

Estimation technique

Dependent variable:

Number of terrorist

attacks perpetrated in

a country in a year

OLS NBREG

Number of terrorist

attacks in the prior

year

0.664

(0.009)**

0.013

(0.001)**

Minority religion is

Islam

0.030

(1.168)

-0.000

(0.055)


Christianity

-0.094

(1.152)

-0.007

(0.054)


Hindu

0.352

(1.496)

0.016

(0.071)


Sikh

-1.612

(4.074)

-0.065

(0.184)


Judaism

-0.004

(3.149)

-0.002

(0.141)


Buddism

0.196

(1.500)

0.008

(0.073)

Majority religion is

Islam

-18.902

(7.383)*

0.257

(0.487)


Christianity

-0.551

(10.973)

3.698

(0.396)**


Hindu

15.829

(10.502)

-1.532

(0.343)**

A minority religion

contains a

fundamentalist faction

5.534

(2.458)*

0.240

(0.111)*

The majority religion

contains a


18.708

(4.208)**

1.799

(0.223)**

Country fixed effects

(161 countries)

coefficients not

reported due to space

Constant 1.269

(5.715)

-1.102

(0.306)**

Observations 7258 7258

R-squared 0.59

Standard errors in parentheses

* significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%

24

Table 2

Estimation technique

Dependent variable:

The country

experienced a terrorist

attack in a given year

OLS LOGIT

The country

experienced a terrorist

attack in the prior year

0.199

(0.011)**

0.928

(0.061)**


Islam

0.000

(0.015)

-0.001

(0.083)


Christianity

-0.001

(0.014)

-0.007

(0.083)


Hindu

0.005

(0.019)

0.026

(0.101)


Sikh

-0.025

(0.051)

-0.296

(0.370)


Judaism

-0.000

(0.039)

-0.020

(0.307)


Buddism

0.003

(0.019)

0.018

(0.108)


Islam

-0.296

(0.092)**

-0.495

(0.879)


Christianity

-0.117

(0.138)

-0.494

(0.819)


Hindu

-0.084

(0.132)

-1.612

(0.582)**

A minority religion

contains a


0.085

(0.031)**

0.584

(0.205)**


contains a


0.098

(0.053)

0.718

(0.333)*


(161 countries)

coefficients not


Constant 0.652

(0.072)**

1.554

(0.686)*


R-squared 0.26



25

Table 3

Estimation techniques

Dependent variable:

Number of successful

terrorist attacks in a

country in a given year

OLS NBREG

The number of

terrorist attacks

perpetrated in a prior

year

0.653

(0.010)**

0.011

(0.000)**


Islam

0.000

(1.460)

-0.000

(0.043)


Christianity

-0.061

(1.451)

-0.002

(0.043)


Hindu

0.159

(1.968)

0.005

(0.059)


Sikh

-0.479

(4.495)

-0.016

(0.130)


Judaism

0.002

(3.381)

-0.000

(0.097)


Buddism

0.070

(1.928)

0.002

(0.058)


Islam

0.367

(17.799)

-1.392

(0.515)**


Christianity

-0.118

(12.260)

0.744

(0.467)


Hindu

19.799

(9.017)*

0.512

(0.427)

A minority religion

contains a


1.986

(2.793)

0.064

(0.081)


contains a


29.531

(5.596)**

1.744

(0.182)**


(161 countries)

coefficients not


Constant 1.669

(10.249)

0.349

(0.271)


R-squared 0.65



26

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31

Notes

1 Jelen and Wilcox (2002) go on to suggest that religious competition may only be a

problem where at least one of the religious traditions is monotheistic.

2 Neither Huntington (1996) nor Fox (2004) argue that civilizations are composed entirely

by religious affiliation. However, they both acknowledge that religion is an important

component of civilization.

3 Fox (2004) also tests Huntington‟s clash of civilizations argument by coding a variable to

account for civilizations. He does not find support for Huntington‟s paradigmatic thesis.

Fox does, however, find support for the idea that religion affects domestic conflict as an

intervening variable: certain religions have fought more often than others and religious

conflict has increased since around 1980.

4 Clearly as the case of Northern Ireland demonstrates this is not an iron clad rule.

However, religious differences in Northern Ireland are also reinforced by economic

cleavages, which might exacerbate the conflict.

5 In the latest attacks in Diyarbakir in January 3, 2008, 7 people died of whom 6 were

young high school students. Interestingly, socio-economic explanations do not fair much

better than religious explanations. Interviews with convicted Kurdish terrorists in 2006

suggest that terrorism is used as a rational strategy by the PKK to force the hand of Turkish

state for recognition of more cultural and political rights for the Kurds (Satana, 2006).

6 We have coded the fundamentalism variables starting from the year of independence of

each country or 1945 if the country got independence before 1945. The data end in 2003

since the Almond et al. book covers fundamentalist groups until 2003.

32

7 Almond et al. 2003 or the Fundamentalism Project volumes do not discuss case selection

criteria in great detail. For example, Pentecostal fundamentalists in various Latin American

countries are mentioned in the Project but Almond et al. (2003) mentions Guatemala in a

general discussion of fundamentalism and dismisses Ecuador Pentecostals as

fundamentalists. We coded positively only countries and groups that were explicitly

described as having a fundamentalist group. Countries that are not discussed are coded as

not having fundamentalist groups.

8For example, the most common socio-economic controls related to the terrorist profile

such as education of the terrorist, social inequality, employment situation etc. are not

available cross-nationally. Subsequent, versions will, however, include macro-variables to

account for state repression (Polity 4) and change in GDP per capita for relative change in

economic deprivation.

9 If groups tend to progress from one type of violence to another in an attempt to get an

unresolved grievance addressed, research on group grievances such as political access

(Birnir, 2007) may inform our future revisions of theory and tests of the relationship of

religion and terrorism.

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