Abstract
This chapter discusses the ethodology of the research conducted for this book. The methodological approach is a qualitative analysis of case studies. There are several reasons for using qualitative analysis for this research. First of all, case studies are suitable for understanding the falsifiability of a theory because of its in-depth analysis. Furthermore, the research design is based on the “most similar systems” (Miller criteria) and on “process tracing” to elucidate the causal chain between the independent variables and the outcome. The chapter also explains the choice of the two case studies along with the selection criteria, which include above all ethnic but not religious heterogeneity, a common constitutional secularism, a recent history of democratization with a unique path to its attainment, and an armed independence struggle for both national independence and ethnic minority independence. Finally, the chapter describes the causal mechanism in the research with the four main hypotheses.
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Notes
- 1.
David Collier, “The comparative method”, in: Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The state of discipline II, Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1993.
- 2.
See on this Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case studies and theory development in the social sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
- 3.
Stephen Van Evera, Guide to methods for students of political science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) p. 21.
- 4.
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) p. 29.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 6.
James Mahoney and Gary Goertz, “A Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research”, Political Analysis 14 (2006): 230.
- 7.
Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
- 8.
Andrew Bennett in “Process Tracing and Causal Inference” Chapter 10 of Henry Brady and David Collier (eds.) Rethinking Social Inquiry (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).
- 9.
Al Qurtuby analyzes the dynamics of political reconciliation and attempts at conflict resolution and peacebuilding to understand the differences between Kurdish conflict and Acehnese conflict. See Sumanto Al Qurtuby, Interethnic violence, separatism and political reconciliation in Turkey and Indonesia, India Quarterly 71(2) (6/2015): 126–145.
- 10.
Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The logic of comparative social inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).
- 11.
John Stuart Mill, A system of logic (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002).
- 12.
CIA World Factbook, 2015.
- 13.
There are no independent data on the numbers of Alevi (as well as Kurds): we go from 10% to 30% of the population. Another thing to take into account is that in Turkey every citizen automatically has Muslim as religious identity on the personal ID, and only if requested is that information removed.
- 14.
Pew Research Center, Mapping the global Muslim population, 2009, accessed September 30, 2017. http://www.pewforum.org/files/2009/10/Muslimpopulation.pdf.
- 15.
See Pew Research Center, The world’s Muslims: Unity and diversity, Chapter 1: Religious Affiliation, 2012. Accessed September 30, 2017. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-1-religious-affiliation/#_ftn9.
- 16.
Martin van Bruinessen, “Secularism, Islamism and Muslim intellectualism in Turkey and Indonesia: Some comparative observations”, in Mirza Tirta Kusuma (ed.), Ketika Makkah Menjadi (Las Vegas: Agama, Jakarta: Gramedia, 2014).
- 17.
Clifford Geertz, Islam observed: Religious development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
- 18.
Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 31.
- 19.
Islam in Indonesia is separate from nation building because of Pancasila (from Sanskrit: Panca, meaning five, and sila, meaning principles) the five principles at the base of the Indonesian state: (1) belief in the one and only God, (2) a just and civilized humanity, (3) a unified Indonesia, (4) democracy, guided by the wisdom of the representatives of the people, and (5) social justice for all Indonesians.
- 20.
See again Martin van Bruinessen, 2014. The separation between church and state is not very clear in many Western secular countries: England still has a state religion; in Germany the state collects church taxes on behalf of the church; in Norway the King is required to be a member of the Church of Norway, and the church is regulated by a special church law, unlike other religions; Italy had a state religion and compulsory teaching of Catholicism in public schools until recently, and the crucifix is still present in school buildings, even if the European Court of Human Rights judged it to be a violation of religious freedom as far back as 2009.
- 21.
Freedom House considered Turkey and Indonesia as “partly free” (an “electoral” but not “liberal” democracy) even in its most recent evaluation of 2017, with the largest 10-year score decline in the entire world apart from the Central African Republic. Indonesia is in a better situation because, among other things, since 1998 it has changed president several times and in 2014 elected its first president that had not come from the country’s political-military elite, while Turkey has had the same leadership and party since 2002. See Freedom in the world 2017, Freedom House, 2017, accessed September 30, 2017. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017. The Economist Intelligence Unit defined Indonesia in 2016 as a “flawed democracy” and Turkey as “hybrid regimes,” between democracy and autocracy. The Democracy Index analyzes 60 indicators with 5 categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; political culture. See The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, The Economist Group, 2017, accessed September 30, 2017. https://infographics.economist.com/2017/DemocracyIndex/.
- 22.
Democracy Ranking is an initiative of the Democracy Ranking Association, located in Vienna, Austria, that creates an annual global ranking of democracies integrating some characteristics of a country’s political system with nonpolitical dimensions like gender, economy, knowledge, health, and environment. The Democracy Ranking 2015 covers countries that were categorized by Freedom House as “free” or “partly free” in the years 2013 and 2014. Accessed September 30, 2017. http://democracyranking.org/ranking/2015/data/Scores_of_the_Democracy_Ranking_2015_A4.pdf.
- 23.
Martin van Bruinessen, 2014, p. 4.
- 24.
Martin van Bruinessen, 2014, p. 4.
- 25.
Ethno-national groups can be defined as “populations which express an ethnic identity and make a claim to being recognized as a nation. The ethnic identity is often grounded in region, common culture, religion or language, or a combination of some of these.” See Ellis Cashmore, Encyclopedia of race and ethnic studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 148.
- 26.
The World Bank, “World Data.” Accessed September 30, 2017. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. CIA, “World Factbook.” Accessed September 30, 2017. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.
- 27.
Matthew Boesler, “The Economist Who Invented the BRICs Just Invented a Whole New Group of Countries: The MINTs,” Business Insider, November 13, 2013.
- 28.
Eric Martin, “Goldman Sachs’s MIST Topping BRICs as Smaller Markets Outperform,” Bloomberg Business, August 7, 2012.
- 29.
Minorities at Risk (MAR) is a university-based research project that monitors and analyzes the status and conflicts of 284 politically active community groups around the world. MAR confirms that the Acehnese minority and the Kurdish minority are ethno-nationalist groups: “regionally concentrated peoples with a history of organized political autonomy with their own state, traditional ruler, or regional government, who have supported political movements for autonomy at some time since 1945.” See “Minorities at Risk Dataset,” MAR. Accessed September 30, 2017. http://www.mar.umd.edu/mar_data.asp.
- 30.
Minority Rights Group International is an international human rights organization founded in London in the 1960s. Their annual index, Peoples under Threat, ranks countries according to the degree of physical danger facing communities. In the 2015 index, of 70 countries, Turkey was ranked the 29th worst country, with 5 communities at risk (Kurds, Alevis, Roma, Armenians, and other Christians), while Indonesia was ranked 66th, with 5 communities at risk (Acehnese, Chinese, Dayaks, Madurese, and Papuans, besides religious minorities). Accessed September 30, 2017. http://peoplesunderthreat.org/.
- 31.
Global Peace Index Report, 2017, Institute for Economics and Peace. Accessed September 30, 2017. http://economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Global-Peace-Index-Report-2015_0.pdf.
- 32.
See, among others, Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia, etc.: Exploring the improbable nation (New York: Norton, 2015). Sener Akturk, “Religion and nationalism contradictions of Islamic origins and secular nation-building: Turkey Algeria and Pakistan,” Social Science Quarterly, Volume 96, Number 3, September 2015.
- 33.
Senem Aslan, “Different faces of Turkish Islamic nationalism”, New York Times, February 20, 2015. Accessed September 30, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/20/different-faces-of-turkish-islamic-nationalism/.
- 34.
See: John Esposito, Tamara Sonn, John O. Voll, Islam and democracy after the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Jocelyn Cesari, The awakening of Muslim democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Joshua Castellino and Kathleen Cavanaugh, Minority rights in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 35.
Jocelyne Cesari, “Religion and Politics: What Does God Have To Do with It?” Religions, 6 (2015): 1337.
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Geri, M. (2018). Research Design. In: Ethnic Minorities in Democratizing Muslim Countries. Minorities in West Asia and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75574-8_3
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