This book delves into the extent of government involvement in religion between 1990 and 2002 using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The study is based on the Religion and State dataset, which includes 175 governments across the globe, all of which are addressed individually in this book. The forms of involvement examined in this study include whether the government has an official religion, whether some religions are given preferential treatment, religious discrimination against minority religion, government regulation of the majority religion, and religious legislation. The study shows that government involvement in religion is ubiquitous, that it increased significantly during this period, and that only a minority of states, including a minority of democracies, have separation of religion and state. These findings contradict the predictions of religion's reduced public significance found in modernization and secularization theory. The findings also demonstrate that state religious monopolies are linked to reduced religious participation.

This study examines the extent of separation of religion and state (SRAS) between 1990 and 2002 in 152 states using the Religion and State database. The results show that when using a strict interpretation of SRAS—nostate support for religion and no state restrictions on religion–no state has full SRAS except the United States. Even when discounting moderate amounts of government involvement in religion (GIR), greater than three quarters of states do not have SRAS. The findings also show that GIR has increased slightly between 1990 and 2002, economic development is associated with higher levels of GIR, states with Muslim majorities have higher levels of government support for religion, and democracies have higher levels of SRAS than do autocratic states but rarely have full SRAS. This contradicts the idea that SRAS is an essential element of democracy and predictions that religion will cease to be an important political and social factor in modern times.

Religion is among the most overlooked factors in the study of international politics. Some reasons for this include a bias against the study of religion that dates to the origins of the social sciences, the influence on social scientists of classical liberal ideas that stress the separation of church and state, and the fact that religion is difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, the essay holds that religion influences international politics in three ways: 1) religion influences the worldviews of many decisionmakers and their constituents and shapes the environment in which decisionmakers act; 2) religion is a source of legitimacy for political decisions and actions; 3) religion is an issue that crosses borders in many ways, including domestic conflicts with international implications. Equally significant are international religious movements, like fundamentalist movements and political Islam, and the foreign policies of theocratic states and other governments, which are guided by religious ideologies. Attention focuses on the international movement for the support of religious rights in the context of the world’s growing interdependence. This underscores the importance of religion in the study of international politics.

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This study examines the role of religion in ethnic nationalism and revolutionary wars between 1945 and 2001 using the Minorities at Risk (MAR) and State Failure (SF) datasets. It asks whether religion is an important factor in conflict and whether the level of this importance has changed over time. Few previous quantitative studies on religion and conflict analyze data from earlier than 1980. The analysis of the MAR dataset shows that until 1980 religious and non-religious ethnic nationalism caused a near-identical amount of conflict, but from 1980 onward, religious nationalist ethnic groups were responsible for increasingly more violent conflicts in comparison to non-religious nationalist groups. The analysis of the SF dataset shows a rise in religious violence beginning around 1965. The earlier date in the analysis from the SF dataset is attributed to the higher sensitivity of that dataset to changes in the level of violence. These results have several implications. First, they show that religion can influence conflict, but it is not the only influence. Second, the influence of religion on conflict can change over time. Third, religion’s influence on conflict has been increasing. This contradicts modernization theory and secularization theory, which were the dominant paradigms in the Western social sciences for most of the 20th century and predicted the demise of religion as a relevant political and social force in the modern era.

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Since Ted Gurr's Why Men Rebel it has become conventional wisdom that (relative) deprivation creates grievances and that these grievances in turn lead to intergroup violence. Recently, studies have yielded evidence that the exclusion of ethnic groups is a substantial conflict risk. From a theoretical angle, the relationship is straightforward and is likely to unfold as a causal chain that runs from objective discrimination to (subjective) grievances and then to violence. We test this proposition with unique group-format data on 433 religious minorities in the developing world from 1990 to 2008. While religious discrimination indeed increases the likelihood of grievances, neither grievances nor discrimination are connected to violence. This finding is supported by a Management and Peace Science ; 34 (2017), 3. -S. 217-239 https://dx.doi.org/10.1177 large number of robustness checks. Conceptually, discrimination and grievances can take very different shapes and opportunity plays a much bigger role than any grievance-based approach expects.