Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:18:13.419Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measurement and Conceptual Approaches to Religious Violence: The Use of Natural Language Processing to Generate Religious Violence Event-Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Robert Brathwaite  and
Baekkwan Park
Robert Brathwaite*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Baekkwan Park
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Robert Brathwaite, Michigan State University, (517) 884-1276, Case Hall, 842 Chestnut Rd. (Rm. S369L) East Lansing, MI. 48825, E-mail: Brathwa1@msu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 81 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the Global Religion Research Initiative at the University of Notre Dame for funding that made this research possible. In addition, special thanks to Ani Sarkissian, Michigan State University for providing comments on an earlier version of this draft.

References

Antal, C. 2008. Reflections on Religious Nationalism, Conflict and Schooling in Developing Democracies: India and Israel in Comparative Perspective. Compare 38(1):87–102.Google Scholar
Asal, V., and Avdan, N.. 2017. Outlawing Sexual Violence: Rape Law and the Likelihood of Civil War. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflicts 10(2–3):104–123.Google Scholar
Basedau, M., Fox, J., Pierskalla, J.H., Strüver, G., and Vüllers, J.. 2017. Does Discrimination Breed Grievances—and do Grievances Breed Violence? new Evidence From an Analysis of Religious Minorities in Developing Countries. Conflict Management and Peace Science 34(3):217–239.Google Scholar
Basedau, M., Pfeiffer, B., and Vüllers, J.. 2016. Bad Religion? Religion, Collective Action, and the Onset of Armed Conflict in Developing Countries. Journal of Conflict Resolution 60(2): 226–255.Google Scholar
Beieler, J., Brandt, P.T., Halterman, A., Schrodt, P.A., and Simpson, E.M.. 2016. Generating Political Event Data in Near Real Time. In Computational Social Science: Discovery and Prediction, ed. Alvarez, R. Michael. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 98–120.Google Scholar
Birnir, J.K., and Satana, N.S.. 2013. Religion and Coalition Politics. Comparative Political Studies 46(1):3–30.Google Scholar
Brathwaite, R., and Bramsen, A.. 2011. Reconceptualizing Church and State: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Separation of Religion and State on Democracy. Politics and Religion 4(02):229–263.Google Scholar
Brück, T., Justino, P., Verwimp, P., and Avdeenko, A.. 2010. Identifying conflict and violence in micro-level surveys. Households in Conflict Network Working Paper (79).Google Scholar
Campbell, D.E., and Monson, J.Q.. 2008. The Religion Card gay Marriage and the 2004 Presidential Election. Public Opinion Quarterly 72(3):399–419.Google Scholar
Casanova, J. 2012. Rethinking Public Religions. In Rethinking Religion and World Affairs, eds. Shah, T.S., Stepan, A., and Toft, M.D.. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 25–35.Google Scholar
Chhibber, P.K., and Shastri, S.. 2014. Religious Practice and Democracy in India. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davenport, C., and Ball, P.. 2002. Views to A Kill: Exploring the Implications of Source Selection in the Case of Guatemalan State Terror, 1977–1995. Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(3):427–450.Google Scholar
Davenport, C., and Stam, A.C.. 2009. What really happened in Rwanda? Miller-McCune, October 6, 2009.Google Scholar
Djupe, P.A., and Grant, J.T.. 2001. Religious Institutions and Political Participation in America. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40(2):303–314.Google Scholar
Fearon, J.D., and Laitin, D.D.. 2003. Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil war. American Political Science Review 97(01):75–90.Google Scholar
Fish, M.S. 2002. Islam and Authoritarianism. World Politics 55(01):4–37.Google Scholar
Fox, J. 2004. Religion and state dataset. The Religion and State Project. http://www.thearda.com/ras.Google Scholar
Fox, J. 2007. Do Democracies Have Separation of Religion and State? Canadian Journal of Political Science 40(01):1–25.Google Scholar
Fox, J. 2015. Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fox, J. 2017. Religious Discrimination in European and Western Christian-Majority Democracies. Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik 1(2):185–209.Google Scholar
Fox, J., and Rynhold, J.. 2008. A Jewish and Democratic State? Comparing Government Involvement in Religion in Israel with Other Democracies. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9(4):507–531.Google Scholar
Garretson, J.J. 2014. Changing with the Times: The Spillover Effects of Same-Sex Marriage Ballot Measures on Presidential Elections. Political Research Quarterly 67(2):280–292.Google Scholar
Grim, B.J., and Finke, R.. 2007. Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies? American Sociological Review 72(4):633–658.Google Scholar
Grim, B.J., and Finke, R.. 2010. The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grim, B.J., Skirbekk, V., and Cuaresma, J.C.. 2013. Deregulation and Demographic Change: A key to Understanding Whether Religious Plurality Leads to Strife. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 9:1–19.Google Scholar
Halterman, A. 2017. Mordecai: Full Text Geoparsing and Event Geocoding. The Journal of Open Source Software 2017:91.Google Scholar
Henne, P.S. 2012. The Ancient Fire: Religion and Suicide Terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence 24(1):38–60.Google Scholar
Huntington, S.P. 1997. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Westminster, UK: Penguin Books India.Google Scholar
Hurd, E.S. 2015. Beyond Religious Freedom: The new Global Politics of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Inglehart, R., and Welzel, C.. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Devel- Opment Sequence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Juergensmeyer, M. 2008. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda. Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Juergensmeyer, M., and Kitts, M.. 2011. Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kedourie, E. 2013. Democracy and Arab Political Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
King, G., and Lowe, W.. 2003. An Automated Information Extraction Tool for International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design. International Organization 57(3):617–642.Google Scholar
Leatherman, J. 2011. Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict. Malden, MA: Polity Cambridge.Google Scholar
Lerner, H. 2013. Permissive Constitutions, Democracy, and Religious Freedom in India, Indonesia, Israel, and Turkey. World Politics 65(04):609–655.Google Scholar
Ludden, D. 1996. Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Macaluso, T.F., and Wanat, J.. 1979. Voting Turnout & Religiosity. Polity 12(1):158–169.Google Scholar
Manning, C., Surdeanu, M., Bauer, J., Finkel, J., Bethard, S., and McClosky, D.. 2014. The Stanford corenlp natural language processing toolkit. In Proceedings of 52nd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: system demonstrations, pp. 55–60.Google Scholar
McBride, M. 2008. Religious Pluralism and Religious Participation: A Game Theoretic analysis1. American Journal of Sociology 114(1):77–106.Google Scholar
McKenzie, B.D. 2004. Religious Social Networks, Indirect Mobilization, and African-American Political Participation. Political Research Quarterly 57(4):621–632.Google Scholar
Mendieta, E. 2011. Jonathan vanantwerpen, eds. 2011. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.Google Scholar
Nordås, R. 2014. Religious Demography and Conflict: Lessons From Côte D'ivoire and Ghana. International Area Studies Review 17(2):146–166.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. 2009. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, G., D'Orazio, V., Kenwick, M., and Lane, M.. 2015. The mid4 Dataset, 2002–2010: Procedures, Coding Rules and Description. Conflict Management and Peace Science 32(2):222–242.Google Scholar
Salehyan, I. 2015. Best Practices in the Collection of Conflict Data. Journal of Peace Research 52(1):105–109.Google Scholar
Satana, N.S., Inman, M., and Birnir, J.K.. 2013. Religion, Government Coalitions, and Terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence 25(1):29–52.Google Scholar
Schrodt, P.A., and Analytics, P.. 2016. Comparison metrics for large-scale political event data sets. http://www.polmeth.wustl.edu/files/polmeth/schrodtepsa15eventdata.pdfGoogle Scholar
Schrodt, P.A., Beieler, J., and Idris, M.. 2014. Three's a charm?: Open event data coding with el: Diablo, Petrarch, and the open event data alliance. In ISA Annual Convention.Google Scholar
Smith, K.M. 2009. Differentiated Trust in Democratic Institutions among Religious Minorities: Does the Size of the Largest Religious Group Matter? International Journal of Sociology 39(1):30–48.Google Scholar
Smith, L.E., and Walker, L.D.. 2012. Belonging, Believing, and Group Behavior: Religiosity and Voting in American Presidential Elections. Political Research Quarterly 66(2):399–413.Google Scholar
Svensson, I. 2007. Fighting with Faith. Journal of Conflict Resolution 51(6):930–949.Google Scholar
Svensson, I. 2013. One god, Many Wars: Religious Dimensions of Armed Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Civil Wars 15(4):411–430.Google Scholar
Svensson, I., and Nilsson, D.. 2018. Disputes Over the Divine: Introducing the Religion and Armed Conflict (Relac) Data, 1975 to 2015. Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(5):1127–1148.Google Scholar
Thakur, M.K. 2013. Democracy, Pluralism and the Religious Minorities: The Muslim Question in India. Social Change 43(4):581–594.Google Scholar
Toft, M.D. 2007. Getting Religion? the Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil war. International Security 31(4):97–131.Google Scholar
Toft, M.D., Philpott, D., and Shah, T.S.. 2011. God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics. New York, NY: WW Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Trigg, R. 2007. Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatized? New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Van der Veer, P. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Varshney, A. 1993. Contested Meanings: India's National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety. Daedalus 122(3):227–261.Google Scholar
Varshney, A. 2003. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Varshney, A., and Wilkinson, S.. 2006. Varshney-Wilkinson dataset on Hindu-Muslim violence in India, 1950–1995, version 2. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.Google Scholar
Verpoorten, M. 2012. Detecting Hidden Violence: The Spatial Distribution of Excess Mortality in Rwanda. Political Geography 31(1):44–56.Google Scholar
Vüllers, J., Pfeiffer, B., and Basedau, M.. 2015. Measuring the Ambivalence of Religion: Introducing the Religion and Conflict in Developing Countries (Rcdc) Dataset. International Interactions 41(5):857–881.Google Scholar
Weidmann, N.B. 2016. A Closer look at Reporting Bias in Conflict Event Data. American Journal of Political Science 60(1):206–218.Google Scholar
Wilcox, C., and Sigelman, L.. 2001. Political Mobilization in the Pews: Religious Contacting and Electoral Turnout. Social Science Quarterly 82(3):524–535.Google Scholar
Wilkenfield, J., Hewitt, J.J., and Gurr, T.. 2012. Peace and Conflict 2012. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, S. 2005. Religious Politics and Communal Violence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, S.I. 2006. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, E.K. 2011. After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar