Religious Freedom and Domestic Terrorism in Asia and Africa, 2000-2009: An Epitaph for the Religious Freedom Peace Thesis?

Abstract

The Religious Freedom Peace Thesis (RFPT) suggests that societies may reduce political violence by fully respecting individuals’ rights to live their faiths according to the dictates of their convictions, but little empirical evidence supports this contention. I redress this evidentiary lacuna by subjecting the RFPT to empirical examination. First though, I attempt to refine the RFPT by proposing a conditional model of political violence that turns to John Locke’s seminal works on religious toleration to link competing approaches to religion and violence, including the so-called “clash of civilizations” and an under-theorized empirical phenomenon described as the “diversity dividend.” The neo-Lockean variant of the RFPT contends that the effects of religious diversity on political violence—domestic terrorism, to be more specific—are conditioned by a regime’s church-state relationship. As such, I examine the possibility that religious heterogeneity drives terrorism under conditions of religious non-freedom. Since the neo-Lockean model is a Western-centric approach to political violence contingent upon Western values (i.e., religious freedom) though, I subject several hypotheses drawn from the RFPT to a battery of statistical analyses intentionally using data drawn from the non-Western world: namely, Asia and Africa from 2000-2009. I ultimately find no empirical support for the RFPT (even its more sophisticated neo-Lockean variant), and while this may stem from limitations in the data, it opens current religious freedom research to critical evaluation, particularly regarding its imperialistic implications.