State Versus Social Repression of Religious Minorities: The Effect on Religious Terrorism

Religious terrorism has sharply increased in the past three decades, both empirically and in its prominence in international counterterrorism scholarship. Researchers have attempted to identify its cause both by applying the existing literature on the determinants of terrorism and by proposing novel hypotheses unique to religious terrorism. One explanation that has come to the forefront of the field is religious repression, often considered a subset of the relative deprivation theory. Scholars have examined the separate impact of both state (governmental) and social (private citizen) repression of religion on increasing religious terrorism. However, to date, no study has compared the two using a consistent dataset and research methods. To address this gap in the literature, this thesis examines the separate and comparative impact of state and social repression of religious minorities on religious terrorism using a unique dataset that spans 180 countries between 1990 - 2010. The results of the regression models support the conclusions that social repression of religious minorities increases religious terrorism while state repression decreases religious terrorism, thereby suggesting that social repression has a greater positive impact than state repression.