Cutting Bread or Cutting Throats? – Findings from a New Database on Religion, Violence and Peace in Sub-Saharan Africa

Matthias Basedau (), Georg Strüver and Johannes Vüllers ()

No 159, GIGA Working Paper Series from GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Abstract: Despite the religious diversity in sub-Saharan Africa and the religious overtones in a number of African conflicts, social science research has inadequately addressed the question of how and to what extent religion matters for conflict in Africa. This paper presents an innovative data inventory on religion and violent conflict in all sub-Saharan countries for the period 1990–2008 that seeks to contribute to filling the gap. The data underscore that religion has to be accounted for in conflict in Africa. Moreover, results show the multidimensionality (e.g. armed conflicts with religious incompatibilities, several forms of non-state religious violence) and ambivalence (inter-religious networks, religious peace initiatives) of religion vis-à-vis violence. In 22 of the 48 sub-Saharan countries, religion plays a substantial role in violence, and six countries in particular—Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan and Uganda— are heavily affected by different religious aspects of violence.

Keywords: religion; sub-Saharan Africa; violence; peace; conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-soc
Date: 2011-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.giga-hamburg.de/dl/download.php?d=/cont ... truever-vuellers.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gig:wpaper:159

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GIGA Working Paper Series from GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Martin Beck ().