Religious Minorities, Mobilization, Protest, Conflict, and Violence in Theory

Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses the theories surrounding the causes of mobilization, protest, conflict, and violence by minorities in general as well as the religious conflict literature. We use these literatures to support our argument that grievances are an important cause of conflict by religious minorities, as well as other types of minority. We discuss critiques of this argument and demonstrate that these critiques overlook important factors and, when examined closely, lack empirical evidence to support many of these critiques. For example, most who claim to demonstrate empirically that grievances do not predict conflict as well as other factors do not include measures for grievances in their studies. Similarly those who argue grievances are ubiquitous, and therefore irrelevant, miss that grievances vary significantly across groups.