Ethnoreligious conflict in the Third World: the role of religion as a cause of conflict

This study posits that the ongoing debate over whether religion is important in politics is, in part, caused by the fact that the role of religion in the Third World is different from its role in Western and former Soviet bloc states. Thus, much of the debate is between scholars who focus on these different parts of the world. This is tested using data from the Minorities at Risk and State Failure datasets. The results show that religion is considerably more important in the Third World. They also show that until the 1990s a greater proportion of Third World conflicts were religious, but in the 1990s this changed and a greater proportion of conflicts in Western and former Soviet bloc states were religious.