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Suicide attacks and religious cleavages

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Abstract

Many experts claim that religious cleavages are one of the major reasons for suicide attacks. To test this hypothesis, we investigate whether the total number of suicide attacks per violent conflict and the annual number of suicide attacks per country are associated with simmering religious conflicts. We distinguish between two kinds of religious cleavages: cleavages at the macro level between the groups engaged in violent conflicts and cleavages at the micro or battlefield level between the actual perpetrators and victims of suicide attacks. Our results do not indicate that religious cleavages are an important precondition for the incidence of suicide attacks over the period 1981-2010.

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Notes

  1. The first suicide attacks in modern conflicts were carried out in Israeli-occupied South Lebanon by the terrorist organization Hezbollah in 1982. Afterwards the incidence of suicide attacks rose quickly, from an average of four attacks per year in the 1980s to about twelve per year in the 1990s and slightly more than 200 per year in the first decade of the second millennium (Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism database).

  2. See Hsiao-Rei Hicks et al. (2011).

  3. Pittel and Rübbelke (2006) show in a theoretical study how individual terrorists are led to develop a strong feeling of belongingness to the organization, which then directs them towards committing suicide attacks. The benefits associated with belonging to a terrorist organization are, of course, likely to be outbalanced by the cost of the attack. Under which circumstances the decision to commit a suicide attack is time-inconsistent and what mechanisms might prevent time-inconsistency are analyzed in Pittel and Rübbelke (2012).

  4. See Bloom (2005), Cook (2007), Wade and Reiter (2007), Piazza (2008), and Collard-Wexler et al. (2014) for extensions and critical assessments of Pape’s theory.

  5. See Pape (2005, pp. 89–92) for a detailed discussion. The recent declaration of a caliphate, centered in Syria, has both established a territorial claim and created a magnet drawing fundamentalist Islam’s true believers to the prophesized final battle with “Rome” (i.e., the West) that will signal the “end days”.

  6. Defining the line of demarcation between religions can be tricky. In Islam, for example, many Sunni Muslims view Shias as apostates, and vice versa. We therefore complement our benchmark analysis that codes Sunni and Shia Muslims as coreligionists with an analysis that codes Sunni and Shia Muslims as belonging to two distinct religions.

  7. Christians are tolerated by Islamists, provided that they submit to Sharia Law and to differentially higher taxes.

  8. This measure of the religious cleavage is motivated by Berman and Laitin (2008) finding that almost 90 % of the suicide attacks covered in their sample were aimed at victims whose religion differed from the attacker’s religion.

  9. See the surveys by Krieger and Meierrieks (2011) and Gassebner and Luechinger (2011).

  10. This dataset is a joint project between the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, and the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO).

  11. This is the definition used by UCDP. For a more in-depth discussion on the definition see the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset Codebook, version 4-2011.

  12. We have included only the case of Lebanon, where suicide attacks were caused by the conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hezbollah. The conflict between the United States and Al Qaeda also resulted in a small number of transnational suicide attacks against American allies (which represent 2 % of our sample). These incidences are not included in the sample since it not clear which country’s interests were targeted.

  13. See Lindberg (2008, pp. 52–53) for details concerning his methodology and his sources (see Appendix A).

  14. This reduces the sample by three countries: Ghana, Haiti and Uganda.

  15. This database was compiled by The Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at University of New Haven. (http://www.isvg.org/about/partners/).

  16. The four cases refer to the conflicts between the Central African Republic and the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity/The Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace, between India and the Kuki National Front, between Myanmar and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, and between Togo and the Togolese Movement for Democracy.

  17. We also included the CCE index together with its square to test whether the relationship between terrorism and democracy is hump-shaped as hypothesized by Bueno de Mesquitas (2013), who infers this relationship from a model in which the endogenous choice of rebel tactics depends on the availability of outside opportunities. We did not find any evidence for a hump-shaped relationship, perhaps because suicide attacks are a viable option even under severe political repression, whereas other forms of terrorism are not (indicating again that suicide attacks are not a minor variation of terrorism at large).

  18. For the period 1981–2010, the CPOST database reports a total number of 2233 suicide attacks in 35 countries. We were able to code approximately 99 % of the cases: 2211 attacks in 32 countries. We accessed and downloaded the data in the period September–October 2011.

  19. The Yazidi creed combines elements from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions. The largest group of Yazidis live in Iraq, near Mosul. The genocidal persecution of the Yazidi in 2014 by the Islamic State (ISIS) led to the American-led attacks on military formations and supply routes of ISIS.

  20. Although according to Alesina (2003) and the CIA’s Factbook the majority of Russians are non-religious, we decided to follow Pape and the MAR database and code Russia as ‘Orthodox Christian’.

  21. See http://www.isvg.org/.

  22. Replacing the democracy-dictatorship variable of Cheibub et al. (2010) by the Constraints on Chief Executive index does not change the inferences regarding the religious cleavage variable, nor other variables.

  23. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (2008, p. 39): “Mapping the global Muslim population: a report on the size and distribution of the world's Muslim population”.

  24. Idem, p. 40.

  25. To identify the dominant religion in the Iraqi provinces we employ the map on religions in Iraq created by Dr. Michael Izady and hosted by the Gulf/2000 project website. (available at: http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Iraq_Religions_lg.png).

  26. On systematic warfare and state-supported terror, see Hillman and Potrafke (2015).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Axel Dreher, Martin Gassebner, Arye Hillman, William F. Shughart II, four referees and the participants of the World Public Choice Meetings 2012 in Miami and the Prague Conference on Political Economy 2012 for helpful comments. Ha Quyen Ngo provided excellent research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Box 138, 78457, Constance, Germany

    Andra Filote & Heinrich Ursprung

  2. Department of Economics, University of Munich, Schackstr. 4/I, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Niklas Potrafke

  3. Ifo Institute, Ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679, Munich, Germany

    Niklas Potrafke

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  1. Andra Filote
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  2. Niklas Potrafke
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Correspondence to Niklas Potrafke.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 11 and 12.

Table 11 Summary statistics of conflict-based data
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Table 12 Summary statistics of country-based data
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Filote, A., Potrafke, N. & Ursprung, H. Suicide attacks and religious cleavages. Public Choice 166, 3–28 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0310-2

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