Isolating the Roles of Religion, Ethnicity, and Political Ideology in Mass Atrocities, 1800–2020

Mukesh Eswaran

Journal of Economics, Management and Religion (JEMAR), 2023, vol. 04, issue 02, 1-49

Abstract: Religion, ethnicity, and political ideology all lend themselves to the perpetration of mass atrocities by creating a sense of identity that sets up an Us/Them dichotomy. Atrocities are modelled here as arising from the motive of acquiring territory but augmented by other-regarding preferences that capture the role of identity. My empirical results using data for the period 1800–2020 confirm that all these identity-driven motivators are associated with mass atrocities, with religion being more powerful than ethnicity. Monotheistic religions (with the strong exception of Judaism) are seen to be associated with more mass atrocity deaths than (polytheistic) Hinduism, lending partial credibility to Hume’s (1757/2010) view on the intolerance of monotheism. While democracies are associated with fewer mass atrocities than autocracies, Christian liberal democracies are not. My statistical analysis rejects the popular presumption that Islam is more violent than Christianity. In fact, in the post-World War II (WWII) era, among the major religions Christianity has been associated with the most mass atrocity deaths. The results also show that mass deaths were higher in atrocities that took place in settler colonies, especially in the post-WWII period of decolonisation. Using mass atrocities as the metric of violence, the correlations found in the empirical work of this paper offer many new and surprising findings.

Keywords: Mass atrocity; ethnicity; religion; political ideology; war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2737436X2350005X
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jemarx:v:04:y:2023:i:02:n:s2737436x2350005x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2737436X2350005X

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics, Management and Religion (JEMAR) is currently edited by Robert M. Sauer

More articles in Journal of Economics, Management and Religion (JEMAR) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().