In Religious Minorities at Risk, Matthias Basedau, Jonathan Fox, and Ariel Zellman undertake the monumental effort of understanding whether and why religious minorities mobilize in response to deprivation, discrimination, and inequality (DDI). Fortunately for everyone interested in the study of religion and politics they were up to the task, producing an excellent text that will serve as a foundation for numerous future studies. Yet, they leave unanswered some of the questions their data analysis raises; hopefully they, or those they inspire, will answer them.
This work is the spiritual successor to Ted R. Gurr's Why Men Rebel (1970). That study, and the accompanying Minorities at Risk dataset, tested the role of grievances on minority groups’ decision to rebel against their governments. Since Why Men Rebel's release, many have questioned the role of grievances in rebellion. Instead, they point to opportunity or greed. By contrast, as Basedau, Fox, and Zellman note in the book's introduction, their “core theoretical argument and empirical finding is that grievances matter” (16).
Following an introduction, four empirical chapters provide the details of the analysis. The first defines the key concepts of the book—DDI, and grievances—and provides summaries of their prevalence around the world. The next chapter explores whether DDI leads to grievances, summarizing literature on the topic and presenting data analysis that verifies the link between the two. The third empirical chapter discusses the debate over whether grievances lead to political mobilization by religious minority groups, while the remaining empirical chapter presents the results of this analysis. These results are intriguing, as they find “different types of grievances influence different types of mobilization” (160). For example, political grievances influence both nonviolent and violent actions, while religious grievances only influence nonviolent actions. The book closes with a conclusion.
The book is convincing. The discussion of the dataset is comprehensive and transparent, and the data and findings seem to be of high quality. Some may raise concerns about the seemingly conflicting results. However, I would argue that they reflect the broad scope of this study and the complexity of the connections between grievances and rebellion among religious minorities. The reason why previous studies have struggled to conclusively answer this question is because they look for a “one size fits all” answer. The reality is much more complicated.
This book should be read by anyone studying religion and politics or civil conflict more broadly. Its relevance to religion and conflict is obvious, but even those studying nonviolent expressions of religion will find it interesting as the mechanisms connecting DDI and political behavior may hold in other contexts. The broader study of civil conflict has moved in a rationalist and materialist direction that would benefit from engagement with works such as this. It can thus promote dialogue across different research programs, something sorely lacking in contemporary political science. And its multitude of analyses (and the dataset the authors graciously made available) can serve as the foundation for many future studies; graduate students in particular will benefit from this book.
I was left unsatisfied, however, with their explanation for the complexity of their findings. If there is so much variation in the extent to which repression produces specific grievances, and specific grievances in turn produce specific forms of rebellion, then something else is going on besides grievances. The authors offer an explanation, suggesting “the particular intensity of observed minority mobilization…largely depend upon the kinds of reforms demanded by distinct forms of minority grievance” (216). Some grievances are easier to address by the state; positive state responses to religious minority grievances undermine violent mobilization. Thus, the different behaviors among different grievances are due to differing state responses.
This is valid but raises many questions about the nature of religious minority mobilization. First, I would have liked the authors to test this dynamic more directly. Even if they are right, this tells us that the relationship between state action, religious group grievances, and religious group behavior is even more dynamic than they realized. By extension, religious politics is more dynamic than many of our theories allow, with the interactions among groups and states mattering more than fixed attributes of each. Scholars of religion and conflict may want to pay more attention to religious politics as a relational phenomenon. This work does require moving away from the conventional regression analyses used here, however.
I was also concerned about a brief discussion in the book's conclusion. The authors argue that “the ‘minorities’ aspect is more important than the ‘religion’ aspect” (238). That is, non-religious conditions and motivations mattered just as much as religious ones in group behavior. This is useful to point out, as it undermines essentialist discussions of religious minorities that posit a direct link from their religious beliefs to their politics. I worry it goes too far, however, in dismissing religion's importance. Even if groups are not motivated solely by religious beliefs, the fact that they define themselves and sometimes their struggle in religious terms leads to distinct behaviors. This is another benefit to the relational approach to religion and politics I have called for, as the focus is not on religion as a discrete motivation for behavior, but instead religion as a process through which politics happens.
These concerns aside, this is a powerful and well-written book that is sure to spark just as many research projects and debates as did Gurr's Why Men Rebel.
