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Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics: Religious Sources of Conflict and Cooperation in the Modern Era
The effect of religious factors on politics has been a key issue since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of religious terrorism. However, the systematic investigations of these topics have focused primarily on the effects of religion on domestic and international conflict. Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics offers a comprehensive evaluation of the role of religion in international relations, broadening the scope of investigation to such topics as the relationship between religion and cooperation, religion and conflict, and the relationship between religion and the quality of life. Religion is often manipulated by political elites to advance their principal goal of political survival. Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson find that no specific religion is either consistently more bellicose or consistently more cooperative than other religions. However, religious similarity between states tends to reduce the propensity of conflict and increase the opportunity for security cooperation. The authors find a significant relationship between secularism and human security.
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Fig. 2.2. Separation of religion and state in national constitutions, 1946–2013Source: Zachary, Ginsburg, and Melton 2014. Measure discussed in chapter 4.
Fig. 5.1. Religious factors interaction with political instability and their effects on the conflict propensity of nations. Note: vertical lines are 95% confidence intervals.
Fig. 5.2. Testing the CoC thesis on monadic conflict—differences between Cold War and post–Cold War patterns. Note: vertical lines are 95% confidence intervals.
Fig. 5.3. Effect of religious similarity on dyadic conflict: intervening variables. Note: Lines are marginal effects of religious similarity (horizontal axis) on the probability of dyadic MID outbreak (vertical axis). Separate lines indicate effects by level of intervening variable (e.g., religious homogeneity, religion-state relations, era). Error bars are 95% confidence intervals. The effect of religious similarity on conflict at one level of the intervening variable is significantly different from the effect of religious similarity on conflict at another level of the dependent variable if the confidence intervals associated with these two lines do not overlap.
Fig. 6.1. Interaction effects on measures of cooperation, nation-year unit of analysis. Note: Solid lines indicate statistically significant relations; nonsignificant relations are marked by dashed lines. Bars in the figure are 95 percent confidence intervals.Significant differences between the effects of different values of the intervening variable (e.g., state age) exist when the confidence intervals associated with one level (e.g., mature) do not overlap with the confidence intervals associated with another level (e.g., new).