The Varieties of Religious Repression

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ushered in the importance of religious cleavages in several societies in the developing world. As religion replaced ideological divisions in facilitating interstate conflict and political instability, governments increasingly repressed religious movements. There is a paucity of contemporary empirical work that examines why and how states repress the mobilization, activism, and proselytization efforts of religious groups. Sarkissian's work fills in this gap by examining why and how states initiate religious repression from a large sample of illiberal democracies. The major contribution of this important work is her argument that there is no unifying theory explaining how states repress religious groups. Yet, Sarkissian offers a parsimonious and elegant theory regarding how there is a large variation as regards to the repressive tendencies of nondemocratic states. The theory suggests that the level of religious repression is contingent upon two interacting dimensions—the level of political competition and the degree of religious divisions within the state. For example, nondemocratic states with very low levels of political competition but with high levels of religious divisions are more likely to have repressive laws that restrict religious-based activities. Conversely, illiberal polities with high levels of political competition but with low levels of religious pluralism in society are likely to have states that do not actively repress religious groups. Lastly, states that have modest levels of political competition and religious pluralism are likely to exhibit repressive tendencies only for certain religious groups that the state deems to be destabilizing. Sarkissian strengthens her theoretical claims using numerous datasets on religion, more specifically those collated from the Religion and State Dataset (RAS) and the International Religious Freedom Act (IRF).

Competition (biology) · Ideology · Pluralism (philosophy) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Religious organization · Religious pluralism · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Religion and Society Interactions