Literature Review
For
this literature review, I selected two articles by Bar-Ilan University
Department of Political Sciences Professor Jonathan Fox: his June 2000 article
“Is Islam More Conflict Prone than Other
Religions?” from the journal “Nationalism
and Ethnic Politics” and his September 2001 article “Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Religions?”
from the journal “Ethnicities”.
Part 1: Summary: “What kinds of questions does each study
attempt to solve? What were their findings?”
In
his June 2000 Nationalism and Ethnic
Politics article, Professor Fox points out that in the early 1990’s, in
the year 1993, 17 out of 40, or 42% of Islamic ethnoreligious minorities engaged
in political demonstrations and 13, or 32.5% engaged in some form of
rebellion. By contrast in the same year,
only 7 of 29 Christian ethnoreligious minorities engaged in some form of
rebellion and only ten percent engaged in political demonstrations. [Fox, 2000,
Page 10] As a possible explanation for this phenomenon, Professor Fox points
out that “Islamic regimes are more
autocratic and repressive and less democratic”. [Fox, 2000, Page 13]
Professor Fox also points out that religion is more important both in conflicts
involving Islamic ethnoreligious minorities [Page 10] and in those involving
Islamic majorities [Page 11] than in those involving Christian ethnoreligious
minorities and majorities. Professor Fox’s data demonstrates that religion is
most important to the conflict when both the majority and minority group are
Islamic, “less so when one of them is
Islamic and least important when neither group are Islamic” [Page 15] and
that religious legitimacy is 50% “more
important for conflicts involving Islamic majorities than for conflicts
involving non-Islamic majorities, including those involving Christian
majorities” [Page 11]. Again, Professor Fox offers an explanation for this
data: that “religious legitimacy is
significantly higher for Islamic regimes”. [Page 13] Fox defines political
legitimacy as “the extent to which it is
legitimate to invoke religion in political discourse” [Fox, Page 19]. Fox’s
data shows that “Islamic minorities
express the highest level of religious demands, are involved in conflicts with
the highest level of religious legitimacy, score the highest on the composite
measure for religious involvement in the conflict and are engaged in conflicts
where, on average, religion is most relevant.” Fox argues that an
explanation for the violent stereotype of militant Islam prevalent in Western
media, policymaking and academic circles since the late 1970’s; which Fox does
not endorse; is that the disproportional involvement of religion in conflicts
involving Muslims is “foreign to the
Western concept of separation of church and state” and so “may seem more threatening to Western eyes.”
[Page 16]
In
his September 2001 article, Fox critiques the hypothesis of the “clash of civilizations” first proposed
in 1992 by Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Director and albert J. Weatherhead University Professor Samuel Huntington.
Fox’s critique of Huntington’s hypothesis is the fact that there is “considerable overlap between Huntington’s
concept of civilization and religion.” [Fox, 2001, Page 297] Professor
Fox’s analysis shows that “most
civilizational conflicts also involve religious differences and most conflict
involving religious differences are also civilizational.” Fox argues that
overlap between civilizational and religious differences “lends credence to the argument that Huntington’s concept of
civilization is mostly a surrogate variable for religion” [Page 311], and
that while there is considerable overlap between the two variables, “civilizations and religion are not one and
the same.” [Page 304]
Part 2: Analysis: “What were the strengths and weaknesses of
each study? What methodological challenges were there and were they
acknowledged? How might you improve this research? Were there conflicting
results?”
In
his June 2000 Nationalism and Ethnic Politics article, Professor Fox’s data
shows that “the more Islamic groups are
involved in an ethnoreligious conflict more important religion is to that
conflict” [Page 15] and that the “level
of autocracy and repression by Islamic regimes can explain much of the
significance of religion to ethnic conflicts in which these regimes are engaged”
[Page 13]. However, Fox points out that most Islamic ethnoreligious minorities do
not live in Islamic states, and so while the fact that Islamic majority groups
tend to have more autocratic government may explain some of the differences
between the importance of religion in conflicts involving Islamic and
non-Islamic minority groups, majority groups and the interaction between the
two, it cannot explain all of them. Fox further argues that even if much of the
importance of religion in ethnoreligious conflicts involving Islamic groups can
be explained by regime type, “the
question of why Islamic regimes tend to be disproportionally autocratic remains
open.” [Page 16] Fox’s data shows that there is no “significant correlation between religious legitimacy and democracy,
autocracy or political discrimination.” [Page 13] He points out that the
explanation that it is the nature of the regime that is responsible for
religion being an important issue does not account for several factors,
including the importance of religion to Islamic minorities.
“If Islam causes regimes to be more
autocratic, the argument that the autocratic nature of a regime is responsible
for religion being a factor in an ethnoreligious conflict is irrelevant.” [Fox,
2000, Page 16]
Fox’s
explanation for the lack of support for the violent stereotype of militant
Islam prevalent in the West in the evidence examined in his analysis is the
nature of the evidence itself, which focused on ethnoreligious conflict. Fox
defines ethnoreligious conflict as “conflict
between two ethnic groups who happen to be of different religions”. Fox
points out “many of the violent conflicts
that have contributed to the stereotype of the Islamic militant are between
secular and religious Muslims who are all members of the same ethnic group.”
In
his September 2001 article, Professor Fox’s data shows that religious
difference are “more important factors in
the conflict behavior of majority groups and international actors than are
civilizational differences”, but that civilizational differences “seem to be more important factors in
determining the behavior of minority groups” [Page 311]. This results in an
inability to definitively answer the question of whether religion’s impact on
ethnic conflict is due to civilizational differences. Fox suggests that the “question of which is more important, religion
or civilization, may be a moot point”, at least for ethnic conflict because
of the possibility that religion and civilization are surrogate variables for
culture and it is cultural differences that are the “true source of any perceived impact” of religion or civilization on
ethnic conflict.
Conclusion: “What Areas of Further Inquiry Would Have
Liked To Pursue Had You The Time? Apply at Least Five Concepts or Theories From
Class Lecture Or Reading”.
By
comparing the importance of religion in Christian and Islamic ethnoreligious
majority and minority groups in his 2000 article, Professor Fox is putting to
the test to the concept of “functional equivalency”. His conclusion, that much of the emphasis on
religion in Islamic ethnoreligious minority groups can be attributed not only
to the autocratic nature of the regimes in Islamic states, but to the fact that
most Islamic ethnoreligious minority groups live in non-Muslim majority nations
lends credence to concept of Jihadist as a reflexive reaction against
secularization and westernization, as theorized by Charles Kurzman in “Bin Laden and Other Thoroughly Modern
Muslims” [Boli, John and Lechner, Frank, eds. “The Globalization Reader”, 2012, page 391-395].
The 2004 article “Religion, Collective Action and the Onset of
Armed Conflict in Developing Countries” by Matthias Basedau of the German
Institute of global and Area Studies and Birte Pfeiffer of the Justus Liebig
University of Giessen in the “Journal
of Conflict Resolution”, as applied to the question “Are Religions More a Cause of Global
Conflict, Solidarity, or Both?” is
an example of the phenomenon of the “universalization of the particular”, and
in doing so challenges the concept of the designation of countries as
“developing”.
1,306 Words
1.
Basedau, Matthias, Birte Pfeiffer, et al. “Bad Religion? Religion, Collective Action
and the Onset of Armed Conflict in Developing Countries”. Journal
of Conflict Resolution Volume 60, Number 2, July 23, 2014. Pages
226-255: http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/60/2/226.full.pdf
2.
Fox, Jonathan. “Clash of Civilization or Clash of Religions? Which is a More Important
Determinant of Ethnic Conflict?” Ethnicities,
Volume 1, Issue 3. September 2001. Pages 295-320: http://etn.sagepub.com/content/1/3/295.full.pdf
3.
Fox, Jonathan. “Is Islam More Conflict Prone Than Other Religions? A Cross-Sectional
Study of Ethnoreligious Conflict”. Nationalism
and Ethnic Politics, Volume 6, Issue 2. June 2000. Pages 1-24: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13537110008428593
4.
Seul, Jeffrey. “Ours is the Way of God: Religion, Identity and Intergroup Conflict”.
Journal of Peace Research.
Volume 36, Issue 5. September 1999. Pages 553-569: http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/36/5/553.full.pdf
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