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ONE GOD FOR ALL: FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS AND TERRORISM

ONE GOD FOR ALL: FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS AND TERRORISM. Jóhanna Kristín Birnir University of Maryland Nil S. Satana Bilkent University. Puzzle.

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ONE GOD FOR ALL: FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS AND TERRORISM

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  1. ONE GOD FOR ALL: FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS GROUPS AND TERRORISM Jóhanna Kristín Birnir University of Maryland Nil S. Satana Bilkent University

  2. Puzzle • Terrorist attacks have increased in the last decades. There is a debate on the rise of a ‘new’ type of terrorism, which argues that religion is now an integral part of terrorism in the world (Hoffman, 1998; Kibble, 2002; Azzam, 2005; Wiktorowicz, 2006; Dobrot, 2007; Hegghammer, 2006; Schmid, 2004; Morgan, 2004; Rapoport, 2002).

  3. Puzzle • Others believe 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).

  4. Puzzle • Limited cross-national empirical testing that addresses how religious majority and minority groups as well as fundamentalist factions in those groups affect intra-state violence and terrorism (Birnir and Satana, 2007).

  5. Observed Implications • What effect do religious differences and religious fundamentalism have on terrorist incidents within a country’s borders? • 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. • H2. The presence of a religious fundamentalist faction in a minority or a majority group increases the probability of terrorist conflict between these groups.

  6. Data • Cases: • All minorities in the world, 1945-2007 Minorities at Risk (MAR) project (Birnir and Wilkenfeld, 2007). • All religious minorities in the world, 1945-2007 (Birnir and Satana original data)

  7. Data • Dependent variables: • Presence of terrorist attacks • Number of terrorist attacks • Number of Successful terrorist attacks Global Terrorism Database (GTD) covering 59503 terrorist incidents from 1970-1997.

  8. Data • Independent variables: • Religious Differences (World Factbook, Joshua Project, Library of Congress and World Directory of Minorities (1997)) Fundamentalism (Almond et al., 2003: 17 and Fundamentalism Project).

  9. Conclusions • Religious family orientation of minority and majority groups has no systematic effect across nations on the presence or number of terrorist attacks carried out in a particular country. No empirical support for the new terrorism literature. • Religious fundamentalism, irrespective of religious 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.

  10. A Last Word • Clearly, fundamentalism matters and religious doctrine does not. • Further data work is required for a more comprehensive test of the effect of fundamentalism on terrorism.

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