This interdisciplinary research project will examine how differences in religious ritual, doctrine, and context shape the motivations and capacities of groups in which religion permeates many aspects of private and public life, sometimes leading those groups to initiate conflict against stronger groups. The project will enhance basic understanding about religion, ethnicity, and conflict by testing hypotheses about different mechanisms through which religion may shape conflict. It will extend and integrate theoretical perspectives in political science, economics, anthropology, and social psychology that connect religion and conflict. It also will assess the motivations and processes though which some religiously infused, low-power groups engage in asymmetrical conflict against groups that seemingly are much more powerful. The project will help fill a significant gap in knowledge for U.S. and international agencies and organizations by providing insights and information regarding the ways in which groups differ in their religious infusion and how these differences translate into group conflict. These insights will assist policy makers and practitioners in identifying factors that create or mitigate conflicts. As recent events have demonstrated, enhanced understanding of the causes, facilitators, and inhibitors of asymmetric conflict between groups having great disparity in power has great significance for enhancing the national security of the U.S. and other nations. The project also will provide interdisciplinary education and training opportunities for students in a range of different settings.
The investigators will conduct this project using three complementary methods in order to test nine hypotheses about the ways through which differences in religious ritual, doctrine, and context affect the motivations and capacities of weak, religiously infused groups to initiate conflict against stronger groups. They will conduct case studies comparing two transnational Muslim ethnic groups in the Middle East and South Asia (the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey and the Baluchi in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). They will conduct qualitative comparative analyses of 40 relatively resource-weak groups around the world, and they will conduct laboratory-based experimentation in the U.S. and India. These approaches will elucidate the factors shaping the circumstances in which resource-poor, religiously infused groups engage in asymmetric conflict, and they will facilitate identification of the circumstances in which religious infusion may lead to more peaceful outcomes. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
