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Does government-based religious discrimination against religious minorities and government support of majority religion affect religiously motivated societal violence between minorities and majority religious groups in Western democracies? Analyzing Muslim minorities, this study tries to answer the question by looking specifically at the religious violence perpetrated by and against these minorities in the West. Using a novel cross-national time-series data on 25 Western countries disaggregated by victim and perpetrator groups, this paper finds that while discrimination contributes to a country encountering religiously driven societal violence perpetrated by both Muslim and majority religious groups, government support for majority religion seems to pose no security threat. Furthermore, a case study analysis of the UK employing the synthetic control method corroborates the results of the cross-country analysis. The findings have important policy implications for counter-strategies against both Islamic and right-wing violent extremism in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does climate change threat affect attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities and climate change refugees? We show that threatening climate change can have deep psychological effects even among social majority groups in relatively prosperous and peaceful societies. Using three survey experiments with self-identified White British participants (N = 616, N = 587, and N = 535), we demonstrate that social majority members who are exposed to threatening information about climate change (vs. neutral information) and, at the same time, feel little national efficacy over climate change, evaluate more negatively certain ethnic and religious minorities, especially Muslims and Pakistanis. We found the same trend in the evaluation of climate refugees, although it reached statistical significance only in one of the experiments. We explain these reactions as pertaining to groups that are perceived as threatening the salient ingroup and its collective agency. Our research significantly contributes to the literature on the social and political implications of (climate change) threat, especially by focusing on boundary conditions, namely the perception of collective control in case of complex and large threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two dominant explanations of contemporary Muslim voting behaviour. A section of public commentators reiterates an old argument that Muslims always participate in politics to defeat the BJP. This argument is not entirely incorrect. The BJP did not deviate from its Modi-centric Hindutva-driven campaign. The party relied heavily on an apparent anti-Muslim rhetoric to reach out to its core voters. The failure of the BJP to secure an absolute majority in Lok Sabha, in this sense, is also seen as an obvious outcome of this strategy. It is claimed that the BJP's attempt to polarize voters on religious grounds encouraged Muslims to vote for non-BJP candidates throughout the country. The second explanation is more speculative. The INDIA alliance has so far tried to avoid any discussion on the overwhelming Muslim support they have received this time. The non-BJP parties, except a few, do not want to publicly acknowledge the fact that their success was almost impossible without active Muslim support. This kind of political reluctance is justified as a strategic silence. There is an assumption that the pro-Muslim gestures of these parties will make the Hindu voters unhappy. Findings of National Election Studies (NES) 2024 take us beyond these popular descriptions of Muslim voting. This survey introduces us to the complexities of contemporary Muslim politics and its electoral manifestations. This article tries to establish a link between Muslim self-perceptions as a religious minority in India and their political behaviour. We ask three basic questions: First, did Muslim communities vote more actively this time than Hindu communities? Second, did they vote as a homogeneous community or as a vote bank? And finally, did they vote basically to defeat BJP? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have found restrictions on minority faith-based communities to be related to the onset of violent religious hostilities. Absent from this work, though, is a consideration of the fact that minority religious discrimination can take different forms, and, consequently, may encourage violence in different ways. This paper seeks to fill this void by examining different forms of minority religious restrictions and their relationship to religious violence. Specifically, we analyze the comparative strength of three basic types of religious discrimination—restrictions on minority religious practices, restrictions on minority religious institutions, and restrictions on conversion and proselytizing —on violence carried out by both religious majority groups and religious minority groups. Interestingly, our analysis shows all three forms of restrictions encourage violence from religious majorities, but not from minorities. We supplement the statistical analysis with a case study of faith-based discrimination and violent religious hostilities in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as our starting point the premise that all domination mechanisms are based partly on their naturalization and reproduction by the very persons that experience them, this study uses the notion of "internalized racism" to explore how Muslims living in Spain internalize some of the cultural and ideological myths that sustain the racism and Islamophobia they experience, especially in relation to institutional practices of control and discrimination. It contributes an innovative approach to the knowledge of racism in the Spanish context, showing how religious and racialized minorities in Spain understand, perceive, experience, and at times reproduce the discrimination they are subject to, and how Islamophobia is entwined with other forms of racism and exclusion as well as with Spain's specific historical relationship with Islam. The research is based on qualitative data obtained from eight discussion groups that met between 2019 and 2021 and comprised a total of 61 Muslims resident in various parts of Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model to identify why, for some, the expression of liberal attitudes towards the LGBT population may be strategic rather than sincere. We show that the British population displays considerably more tolerant views towards homosexuality compared to the end of the 1980s. However, there is evidence that this has slowed in recent years, especially in areas that have experienced the highest levels of immigration, particularly from countries outside Europe. We explain these changes with reference to two effects that immigration/multiculturalism may have – direct cultural and indirect political effects – the latter manifested in selective liberalisation such that for some members of the in-group adopting a liberal attitude towards a group that was once the salient out-group (in this case the LGBT population) generates greater benefits for the in-group by creating disutility for the currently salient out-group (in this case culturally conservative religious minorities and immigrants). We explore both influences using survey data and find strong evidence for the first effect and suggestive support for the second effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identities of religious believers can motivate believers' passions, emotions, and action tendencies. Religious identity-based passion can, therefore, lead people to identify with certain kinds of movements, both peaceful and extremist. Around the globe, identities of religious minorities provide a compelling context for studying peaceful and extremist activism driven by passion. Building on previous literature on social identity theory, passion, and religious identity, it was hypothesized that religious identity predicts passion of both types: Harmonious Passion (HP) and Obsessive Passion (OP). It was proposed that people who were harmoniously passionate about their religious identity would promote peaceful activism whereas people who were obsessively passionate would promote hatred and extremism. A sample of 221 devout Shias (a religious minority) from Pakistan participated in the survey-based experiment of this study (males = 108, females = 113; ages ranging from 19 to 38 years, M age = 22, SD = 2.13; experimental condition = 111, control condition = 110). The results supported the key hypotheses of the study: identification with a minority (Shia Identity) leads to both Harmonious Passion (HP) and Obsessive Passion (OP); when the Shia Identity was threatened, HP and OP scores were lower. Furthermore, HP predicted peaceful activism whereas, under a threat to identify, OP increased and showed a significantly higher violent stance, predicting religious extremism. These findings support the assumption that HP leads to Peaceful Activism, whereas OP is associated with increased support for Extremism and Hatred. The results of this study replicated existing theoretical and empirical predictions about passion pathways and threats to religious identity. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of contemporary identity threats and activism strategies among Muslim minorities in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after partition, Pakistan proposed separate electorates for religious minorities, including the Scheduled Castes (SC), with hopes of establishing an Islamic democracy. This article analyses the Pakistani state's efforts to give distinct electorates to SC, which resulted in the retention of caste as a constitutional category, primarily among 'Hindus'. It also looks on East Pakistani politicians' unwillingness to bridge political divides in the early years of Pakistan's history. By drawing on fresh archival sources, this exploration sheds insight on the shift/transformation in East Pakistan's conceptualisation of the nation immediately following the partition. It argues that the colonial classifications of majority, minority, caste and SC were maintained by the post-colonial state for nation-building programmes and power politics. East Pakistani leaders, on the other hand, repudiated this continuity as they sought to oppose West Pakistan's political dominance. This article also demonstrates that there is a historical discontinuity between the post-partition and the contemporary politics of the Scheduled Castes in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider the intersection of experiential learning and equity work through the lens of a 10-week project: "Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard" (L2BB), undertaken in collaboration with a group of six high school seniors at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2022. L2BB was part of a broader undertaking known as The Workshop, an experimental school-within-a-school that seeks to reimagine education beyond the restrictive norms or "grammar" of schooling. Mirroring the emergent and adaptive methods of L2BB, this article incorporates student voices, narrative interviews, and methodological reflections to advance our claim that an embodied, listening-first model of learning avoids common pitfalls of community-based learning while enabling students to develop a more accurate picture of racial and religious minorities in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the hybrid and interrelated nature of religion and secularism among religious minorities is still scarce. This study explores how young adult religious minority students in Israel, Muslims and Druze, integrate their religious worldviews within modernity, separately for each group and comparatively for both, with special attention to their conflictual position as minorities. The research data were collected as part of a mixed-methods research project—Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG), which used the Faith Q-Sort method (version b)—and through semi-structured interviews. The findings reflect the multiple ways in which modernization processes can shape the religious worldviews of minority students and confirm previous findings on the multifaceted manifestations of religiosity and secularization. Furthermore, the study highlights the indirect manner through which the position of "religious/ ethnic minority" might promote secularization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on religious inequality in Europe has focused mainly on the position of religious minorities, primarily Jews and Muslims. Investigations into Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression, however, are merely one side of the coin. This article draws attention to Christian privilege as a different, but related phenomenon. It understands 'privilege' to be part of the study of hegemony, as the asymmetrical counterpart of structural oppression. The article situates Christian privilege within secular Christian hegemony in Western Europe and explores its relation to racial and religious exclusion. It identifies three different types of Christian privilege and outlines a framework for normatively evaluating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to conceptualize and analyze how processes of deglobalization are interdependently connected with processes of dehumanization, double bind, and racialization in the field of radicalization of ethnic and religious minorities in Denmark. We analyze two sociopolitical cases to show how deglobalization takes form in local practice, enabling or limiting specific subjects' and groups' possibilities of being perceived and accepted as Danish citizens. Relations between radicalization and dehumanization are explored across subjective, societal, political, and discursive practices linked to double bind processes and possible movements beyond them. Our aim is to establish a theoretical framework for exploring a psychology of deglobalization that takes into account processes of racialization, mis-interpellation, double bind, and the possibilities for rehumanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of why members of a majority group, despite their more powerful status, may protest against low-power minority groups. The present study addressed this question in the context of immanent intergroup relations between Muslims, as the majority group, and non-Muslims, as the minority group, in Indonesia. It is argued that at the core of such collective protests is a threat by association, a perception of the majority group members that the minority groups are in league with the West which threatens the existence of Muslims worldwide. Based on data collected using a survey questionnaire from Indonesian Muslims (N = 418) this study tested a hypothesised model using threat by association posed by the minority groups, Islamic puritanism and beliefs relating to western conspiracy to predict collective protests and intolerant intentions against non-Muslim minorities in Indonesia by using MPlus version 7.0. The hypothesised model found empirical support. The relationship between threat by association and Islamic puritanism with collective protests was mediated by Western conspiracy beliefs. It was also found that support for collective protests got translated into majority group members' religious intolerant intentions against the people belonging to the non-Muslim minority groups. The article discusses the theoretical implications and research limitations of these empirical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

**Translator's note: Haifa implies that Iran is the only Muslim/ Arab country with compulsory hijab, which is not entirely accurate. I was raised and socialized as a woman, I was subjugated to physical, emotional and sexual abuse not only by the fascist regime of my country, but also by the patriotic household I was born into and was enabled by the Islamic regime. B PARASTOU FOROUHAR AND STATE VIOLENCE ON DISPLAY Bahar Noorizadeh b Graph Graph Graph B HAIFA ASADI b Graph Translation of Haifa Asadi's Twitter feed The elimination of mandatory hijab is not a luxurious demand. When you overlook these types of oppression and reduce the blood that is spilled in these lands to compulsory hijab - without explaining what the gender/ ethnicity/racial apartheid of this regime has done to the people of this land - you are practically turning compulsory hijab into a simple and obvious problem with a simple and obvious solution, when in fact, compulsory hijab is a complex and multi-layered political oppression. [Extracted from the article]

Religious minorities are victims of political isolation and persecution in societies, where they are subject to violence and discrimination. This study was undertaken in a terrorism-affected area to explore those elements that subjugate and suppress religious minorities' political participation and representation. To conduct an in-depth analysis, a qualitative inquiry was used for data collection and analysis. The researcher interviewed 13 Christians, seven Hindus, and six Sikhs, using a purposive sampling technique and a semi-structured interview guide. The primary data were analyzed using the thematic analysis technique. The researcher found that some of the underlying factors behind the political persecution are leadership vacuum, political neglect, post-election negligence, vote dislocation, political ignorance, and political subordination. This study presented a framework for policymakers to solve minorities' political problems, and for researchers to better understand the minorities' political oppression on local and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socio-political conditions of Pakistan are not good for many religious and ethnic minority groups. This study explores the frustration and motivation of Muslim and non-Muslim young students around political participation in this environment. A survey research design was followed to achieve this objective. Seven-hundred secondary school students affiliated with Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Ahmadiyya communities participated in the study. A self-reported questionnaire was used to gauge the respondents' political efficacy, attitude towards democracy and motivation for expected political participation in the country. The findings demonstrate students' concerns, to varying extents, about the performance of political institutions in the country. The religious affiliations of the participants have significant influence on their motivation to contribute to political affairs. The results are alarming for a country with an uncertain democratic record for religious and ethnic minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Scholars have found that as a multi-facet phenomenon, religion has a complicated relationship with people's health well-being. However, current research on health and religion has left a vacuum in understanding why we observe widespread health disparities between the majority and minority religious groups. Purpose: The present study is aimed at two purposes. First, we conduct a cross-national comprehensive examination of the relationship between religious minority/majority status and self-rated health. Second, we investigate the moderating potential of political contexts on the relationship in question. Methods: Drawing from the 2010–2014 wave of World Values Survey, we construct an analytic sample containing about 70,000 individual cases nested within 51 countries, and apply multilevel modeling to account for the hierarchical data structure. Results: We first find that religious minorities are less likely to report good/very good health status relative to members of majority group. However, we note that the religious minority health disadvantage is driven by a few country outliers. After exclusion of any of these country outliers from the analysis, there is no significant health difference between majority and minority groups. Moreover, we find that political contexts moderate the health effect of being a religious minority. In countries with low levels of democracy or heavy religious restriction on minority groups, people of minority groups are less likely to report good/very good health compared with those belonging to majority group. By contrast, in societies with high levels of democracy or low levels of religious restriction, the health dispartities between religious majority and minority groups become non-significant. A series of sensitivity analysis, including using multiple-imputation sample and different ways of coding key variables, provides credibility to the results. Conclusions and Implications: This study's findings suggest that religious minorities experience health disadvantage, only when minority groups are denied of political and religious freedom. Compared with past works that mostly focused on a single or a few societies, this study provides large-scale, cross-national evidence for the issue of religious minority health. This study also adds to our understanding of how political context shapes the health impacts of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minority group experiences in urban settings are always subjected to the problem of top-down or external categorisations which are related to interpersonal and material interactions within the city. To catch those interdependencies our research is concerned with whether people externally categorized by us as ‘Muslims’ in the city of Krakow determine or motivate their actions and relationships mainly on the basis of religion and whether they engage in constant, regular interactions with others as ‘Muslims’. The aim of our article is twofold. First it highlights the need for researchers to examine their own assumptions about the categories they are using. Social categories determine the outcome of the research and position externally the research subjects in social networks that not necessarily mirror their actual experiences. The study therefore is exploring whether the category of ‘Krakow Muslim’ reflects their experience of the city. The second aim is to propose a variation of the ‘living space maps’ analysis, introduced by Martha Muchow (1935), to explore whether our research subjects experience the city in a religious manner and if they experience religion in a specific way in Krakow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together the notions of religious diversity and social progress and argues, against the sceptics, that the former can – and indeed must – contribute positively to the latter. To do this, it builds on to a major initiative in which the author had co-responsibility for the material on religion. This was the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) which assessed state-of-the-art knowledge that bears on social progress across a wide range of economic, political and cultural questions. The work of the IPSP as a whole is briefly outlined; the article then looks at the chapter on religion within this, foregrounding the material on religious diversity. This material is placed in a wider discussion of multiculturalism and secularism, in which links are made with the work of Tariq Modood and the Bristol Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. A short postscript introduces a more topical issue. It considers the role of religious communities (more especially religious minorities) as societies confront the ravages of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys the long history of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. Interfaith relations in this context have ranged from cordial to tense, depending on a variety of internal and external factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study aims to investigate what factors influence whether adults detect a change between social partners in a brief interaction. In two experiments, we examined whether locale diversity, a stranger's marginalized minority status (e.g., minority race, minority religious affiliation), and race congruence (e.g., own or other race) influenced the likelihood of being differentiated. Using a change blindness paradigm, an experimenter approached pedestrians asking for directions, then surreptitiously changed places with a confederate. After the switch, we measured whether pedestrians noticed if the person had changed. In Experiment 1, noticing rates were significantly lower for confederates belonging to a minority race compared to White confederates, but only in the more homogenous location and not in the highly diverse location. In Experiment 2, pedestrians were least likely to detect a change when confederates belonged to a religious minority and a racial minority. We discuss the important implications for prejudicial behaviour and eyewitness identification, as well as the utility of performing psychological research outside of the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I use the example of Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim and Algerian-origin police officer who was one of the victims of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, as a way to understand how Islamophobia is a form of racism. Based on ethnographic research in Paris and its banlieues with the middle-class segment of the North African second generation, I discuss how they experience 'collective punishment' due to their status as both racial and religious minorities. I further trace the use of a 'Muslim other' category as a catch-all term for non-White individuals in a society that disavows race and ethnicity. I ultimately demonstrate how Islamophobia is a form of racism – one that sees certain individuals as too culturally different to ever be fully accepted as part of the French mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have highlighted how science communication reifies forms of structural inequality, especially race and gender, we examine the challenges science communication pose for religious minorities. Drawing on the disproportionate magnitude of COVID-19-related morbidity on Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Jews, we examined their processes of COVID-19 health decision making. Survey results show that both religious and health-related justifications were common for personal decisions, yet a disparity was found between the ways social distancing guidelines were perceived in the general education context compared with the religious context, signaling the importance for inclusive models of science communication that account for religious sensibilities and state-minority relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent anthropological scholarship on Islam has tended to carve out the 'everyday' as a space of Muslim life that has the potential to escape the normativity of religious discourses. In this paper, I discuss how the special issue edited by Di Puppo and Schmoller critically engages these debates by first moving the lens of attention from the religious to the 'secular' sphere as the source of normative discourse. The essays collected in the special issue focus indeed on the state's and lay officials' discourses in post-Soviet, self-declared secular Russia as the normative framework that defines much of the commitment and self-understanding of Muslims in the region. But the special issue does more. It also shows that far from remaining stalled in their own respective domains, normative discourses and 'daily practices' intertwine profoundly, as Muslims navigate through the normative dichotomies that are imposed on them by national and supranational global discourses. In the process, Muslims in post-Soviet Russia are able to bend these denominations to their needs, as they struggle to see legitimised their status of citizens belonging to a minority religious confession. In this vein, I conclude by suggesting that rather than reproducing static oppositions between the levels of discourse and that of practice, it is to the mutual interactions between the two and to the alternative possibilities that are disclosed by Muslim life within and without overdetermined limits that we have to turn when investigating the multiplicity and diversity of Islam in Post-Soviet Russia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practices and narratives of inclusion and exclusion in Iraq in relation to ethnic and religious minorities displaced by the Islamic State and the resulting war. Examining the displacement in Iraq through the lens of citizenship, and utilising 29 in-depth qualitative interviews with internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, this article argues that displacement has been accompanied by practices and narratives meant to include internally displaced people in a particularistic articulation of belonging rather than to ensure a substantive participation as Iraqi or Kurdistan Region of Iraq citizens. Rhetoric of citizenship in Iraq changes between civic and ethnosectarian belonging based on conflict dynamics and the competition for power, whilst remaining ethnosectarian in reality. Thus, internally displaced people and their citizenship have become entangled in wider ethnosectarian competition in Iraq, and narratives and practices of citizenship change to fit the objectives of these wider actors, mainly Baghdad and Erbil, rather than being based on inclusiveness and civic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between the state and military in Myanmar to understand the country's policies regarding persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in the context of the Rohingya population of Arakan. The article applies the idea of the garrison state, a concept originally developed by Harold J Lasswell. It applies a process-tracing approach to understand the relations between the state and military of Myanmar, by examining primary documents and secondary literature on the subject. The article argues that Myanmar is a state which is compulsively concerned about perceived threats to its sovereignty. This real or imagined anxiety translates into cultural, social and economic attributes, and its policies to [re]produce violence against the Rohingya minorities of Arakan. These features endorse the idea that militarism is habitually developed by a garrison state, such as Myanmar, which is reflected in the policies of citizenship and the construction of minorities. Therefore, violence becomes a continuous tool that is applied by the state, particularly against the peripheral minorities and other marginalised groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated in communication privacy management (CPM) theory, this study found that anticipated risk was the strongest predictor of minority religious identity disclosure at work. Older workers who regarded non-Christian belief or non-belief as central to who they were and who worked in smaller organizations disclosed their identity more than other participants. The follow-up analyses also revealed that the degree of disclosure varied by ethnicity, geographic region, religion, job rank, and membership in the organization's dominant religion. Religious accommodation policy and religious centrality were associated with increased anticipation of benefits, which in turn was linked to increased disclosure. Finally, sense of belonging was associated with increased anticipation of benefits and decreased anticipation of risks, which also indirectly impacted disclosure. This study added more depth to CPM privacy rules and provided a broader understanding of minority religious identity disclosure at work. Recommendations for creating a religiously inclusive workplace and directions for future studies are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution zooms in on a particularly disconcerting development in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, that is visible in several recent cases brought by religious minorities with a migrant background, in which the Court accepts – in the name of (requirements for) integration – far-reaching restrictions on the rights of these religious minorities with a migrant background to be respected in their own religiously inspired way of life. The Court furthermore glosses over a context of Islamophobia and related stereotypes, thus failing to identify and counter instances of discrimination on grounds of religion. The article argues that the ECtHR in these cases not only drifts away from the counter-majoritarian core of human rights protection, turning several of its steady lines of jurisprudence favourable to (the effective protection of) minorities' fundamental rights on their head, but also allows States to basically push religious minorities with a migrant background out of the public space/public schools, in the name of social integration – an integrated society. Ultimately, States are contesting the substantive citizenship of religious minorities with a migrant background and the Court, unfortunately, enables them to exclude and marginalise these religious minorities with a migrant background. The Court thus disregards the foundational value of the right to equal treatment for the human rights paradigm, and moves away from an equal and inclusive citizenship. Put differently, the Court enables governments to dress up Islamophobic, exclusionary agenda's with a human face, thus challenging the boundaries of citizenship in the name of 'integration'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports two studies in which we examined how the politicization of religious communities influences both affective and cognitive intergroup differentiation. In Study 1, we used a longitudinal research design and observed that politicization among members of Protestant communities in Germany negatively affected their feelings towards and perceptions of commonalities with homosexuals and Muslims. In Study 2, we used a cross-sectional design and replicated the results with members of Protestant communities in Brazil as research participants and homosexuals and adherents of Afro-Brazilian religions as target groups. However, unlike politicization, which revolves around demands for greater support directed at the larger society, community solidarity, which focused on engagement for one's community, was unrelated to affective intergroup differentiation and even negatively related to cognitive intergroup differentiation, especially in the German context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the article by Gayatri Singh, Trina Vithayathil and Kanhu Charan Pradhan on residential segregation by caste in urban India, in this issue of Environment and Urbanization. It compares caste-based residential segregation in India and Pakistan, focusing on Mithi and Karachi in Pakistan. The paper discusses how political change, migration, violence, and religious and ethnic identity in Karachi have shaped preferences on where different castes and religious minorities wish to reside. Meanwhile, in Mithi, where capitalism is not fully developed, caste continues to determine where one can live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether objective discrimination against religious minorities causes individual members of a minority to form grievances and engage in political activity against the government using data from the World Values Survey and Religion and State-Minorities datasets. We find that higher levels of objective discrimination do not predict more grievances and organizing activity. This contradicts predictions made by relative deprivation theory but is consistent with a social psychology literature which finds a "personal/group discrimination discrepancy." That is, objective discrimination often has little influence on grievances expressed by individuals. Taking these findings, along with the failure of the empirical literature to support relative deprivation theory, the relative success of the grievances-based literature, the arguments of the mobilization literature, and a brief case study we argue that the key factor explaining collective action is the effort of group leaders to mobilize the grievances of group members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the question how cultural diversity, expressed in a parliamentary debate, can influence the space given to religious minorities to substantiate their identity. The debate about the prohibition of non-stunned ritual slaughter in the Dutch Parliament in 2011/2012 serves as case study. A frame analysis reveals that tensions exist between minority rights and majority values and with regard to the regulation of religion in the public sphere. The article concludes that politicians struggle to position themselves amidst those fundamental questions and certainty is sought in the legal, political, scientific, economic and historical domain. There is no simple answer to the question what determines the space given to religious minorities to substantiate their identities. Although a political majority decision was taken at the end of a long trajectory, this was a compromise that leaves the controversy with its related uncertainties unsolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel it has become conventional wisdom that (relative) deprivation creates grievances and that these grievances in turn lead to intergroup violence. Recently, studies have yielded evidence that the exclusion of ethnic groups is a substantial conflict risk. From a theoretical angle, the relationship is straightforward and is likely to unfold as a causal chain that runs from objective discrimination to (subjective) grievances and then to violence. We test this proposition with unique group-format data on 433 religious minorities in the developing world from 1990 to 2008. While religious discrimination indeed increases the likelihood of grievances, neither grievances nor discrimination are connected to violence. This finding is supported by a large number of robustness checks. Conceptually, discrimination and grievances can take very different shapes and opportunity plays a much bigger role than any grievance-based approach expects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiculturalism in a European context increasingly has come to denote a concern with religious minorities. Claims for multicultural accommodation of minorities therefore potentially conflict with secularist requirements of separation of politics and religion. Whether there is a conflict depends on the general understandings of multiculturalism and secularism. The paper therefore distinguishes and examines different general understandings. Both multiculturalism and secularism can be understood as sets of policies, or as forms of minority accommodation or views about the relationship between religion and politics defined in relation to liberalism. Both understandings are problematic, so the paper proposes alternative formal understandings of multiculturalism and secularism. Multiculturalism denotes interpretations of what underlying (often liberal) principles imply under new circumstances of diversity. Secularism denotes what such principles imply for the relationship between politics and religion. Such formal understandings provide theoretical frameworks for specifying different conceptions of multiculturalism and secularism and for determining in precisely which respects conflicts might arise. But the frameworks also indicate that conflicts are not general or necessarily fundamental, and they provide tools for reinterpreting conceptions in ways that might avoid apparent conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although “rule of law” is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. These mechanisms include the procedural requirements and choreography of litigation (Sri Lanka), the strategic use of legal language and court judgments by political and socioreligious groups (India), the activities of partisan activists who mobilize around litigation (Malaysia), and the exploitation of “public order” laws in contexts framed by antagonism targeting religious minorities (Pakistan). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars typically frame the subgroup problem in education in terms of protecting religious minorities from majoritarian encroachment. This essay explores a different aspect of the subgroup problem: what happens when an antidemocratic religious minority becomes a local majority responsible for the promotion of the public good? This essay uses the takeover and plundering of a public school district by Hasidic Jews in New York State as a case study. The settler colonist orientation of the Hasidim uniquely situates them to take advantage of the legacies of nineteenth-century school districting laws, but that same orientation leads them to grossly antidemocratic behaviors that victimize children of color. In such a case, democracy demands state intervention into the much-cherished arena of democratic localism. For advocates of church-state cooperation in the management of public schooling, this case provides a cautionary tale about the critical importance of substantive commitments to democratic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the Hindu Show of Strength occasion in Varanasi, India, for golden jubilee celebration of the right-wing Hindu nationalist organization Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). It states that the keynote speaker was the chief priest of the Gorakhnath Hindu monastic order Yogi Adityanath. Topics discussed are Adityanath's role as Member of Parliament of the political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), VHP's ideology of Hindutva, and BJP's hate speech against religious minorities.

The present research investigates the effects of social exclusion on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities. Native-born German participants who were socially excluded rather than included reported greater approval for stricter legislation regarding the naturalization of immigrants (Study 1), reported greater prejudice against openly observant Muslims (Studies 2 and 3), and stronger agreement with the view that immigrants are financial burdens to the state (Study 4). Social exclusion threatens the sense of personal control, which in turn leads to stronger rejection of stigmatized outgroups (Study 3). When perceived control was experimentally enhanced, the social exclusion effect disappeared (Study 4). The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent attention to the history of constitution-making in India reflects ongoing concerns about the difficulties and limitations of India’s secular, democratic experiment. Scholars assessing India’s secularism have pointed to the failure to separate the state from its involvement in religion from the outset. Through a study of the Constituent Assembly debates, this article suggests that the emphasis on ‘religion’ as the problem for secularism has been a distraction, taking the gaze away from the substantive arguments minorities were making about how their equal citizenship should be guaranteed. It remained unclear what recognition of ‘minority’ status was meant to achieve in postcolonial India and what it signified. In failing to recognise the claims of religious minorities for their equality, the Constituent Assembly reified their position as permanently unequal communities in the newly independent state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the importance of embracing diversity and transnational identity as central parts of European identity. The author argues that geopolitical boundaries should not longer define European identity in the 21st century, and notes the impact of increased immigration in Europe on the rise in diversity. He provides his thoughts on European citizenship requirements and protection of religious minorities' rights, particularly those of Muslims. Criticism is also leveled at Europe's anti-immigration movement.

In course of last few decades, India had witnessed a number of devastating attacks on religious minorities. These raise doubt whether they enjoy ample space in the country. The essay reviews how one of India’s religious minorities, residing in a faraway urban location, communicates with the host society, remembers their past and other home memories. It addresses some of these issues with reference to the twentieth-century Punjabi-Sikhs, migration and settlement in Kolkata and focuses on their complex, many-hued relationships with the city. The article explores their extent of success in maintaining differences with the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Euro-multiculturalism is (1) concerned with religiously defined immigrant minorities; (2) sees policies of recognition as a means to secure multicultural equality between groups; (3) endorses the moderate secularism of European states; and (4) adopts a contextualist approach to answering the normative question. Proponents of ‘Euro-multiculturalism’ want to ask when unequal recognition by the state of religious communities is a form of misrecognition and when it is unjust (or wrong). The article discusses the question by way of an examination of the Danish case of unequal recognition by the state of religious minorities. It argues that state–religion relations can be analysed as relations of recognition, which are not only unequal but also multi-dimensional, and that it is difficult to answer the question whether multi-dimensional recognitive inequalities are unjust or wrong if one endorses moderate secularism and contextualism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has increasingly deferred to States' margin of appreciation when considering interferences with the right to manifest religion under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In contrast, the Advisory Committee (AC) on the Framework Convention on National Minorities (FCNM), despite originally being feared to be a highly politicised body, has allowed States very little room for manoeuvre when considering the implementation of Convention rights. In order to explore these seemingly contradictory positions, this article examines the approaches of the ECtHR and the AC towards two controversial manifestations of religion: the right to construct places of worship and the right to wear religious clothing. It argues that the ECtHR, by developing minimum standards that defer to the prejudices of the majority, is in danger of undermining the progress made by the AC towards establishing consistent minority rights standards throughout Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relations between religious minorities and states, focusing on Venezuela, Turkey, and China. It considers the conditions of Jews in Venezuela, commenting on anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment and examining Jewish emigration. The article addresses Orthodox Christianity in Turkey, reflecting on relations with the government and noting efforts for religious tolerance undertaken by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. It also considers Christians in China, focusing on Zupan, a member of the Shouwang Christian Church, and noting his surveillance by the Communist Party and university authorities.

Most of the best-known women writers of anglophone Indian fiction have been Hindu, and in the context of the intensification of communal politics in India, it is important to also consider the voices of their Muslim counterparts. Shama Futehally’s novel Reaching Bombay Central (2002) engages with both gender and communal politics from a Muslim perspective, and this article examines the ways in which the narrative implicitly challenges a number of popular perceptions about the disadvantaged position of Muslim women in India. The novel dramatizes the environment of inter-communal tension but conspicuously downplays the role of religious ideology and legal disadvantage, both of which have been prominent in public debates about Muslim women in India. In its dramatization of the power dynamics within a middle-class Muslim marriage, the narrative suggests that women’s disempowerment is located above all in the domestic sphere and in interpersonal relationships, and that their subordinate status is not specific to particular religious communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a self-conscious religious collective with minority status, Jews seeking recognition in the modern nation-state have had to fashion not just principles of belief, but also a narrative to articulate the historical essence of their existence. The most common narrative of the twentieth century has been a story, not a myth-a story, moreover, with limited capacity for interfaith dialogue. By the end of the century, that story began to lose its compelling quality. The twenty-first century demands a return to myth, with the promise of more promising theological conversation across faith lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that 'ethnic penalties' exist in British labour markets, whereby members of ethnic minority groups fail to get into occupations commensurate with their qualifications. Often these analyses of occupational attainment by education treat minority groups as homogeneous, not recognising that in several there is substantial heterogeneity on other criteria, such as religion, which may also influence occupational attainment. We argue that there are significant variations among these ethno-religious minorities regarding their labour-market performance, which is measured using a continuous scale of skill-level distances-a measure of returns to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social integration of Canada’s new religious minorities is determined more by their racial minority status than by their religious affiliation or degree of religiosity, according to results from Statistics Canada’s 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey. Interview questions tap life satisfaction, affective ties to Canada, and participation in the wider community. Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus are slower to integrate socially, mainly because they are mostly racial minorities. Degree of religiosity affects social integration in the same ways as ethnic community attachments in general, positively for some dimensions, negatively for others, and similarly for different religious groups. Patterns are similar in Quebec and the rest of Canada; results carry implications for the debate over “reasonable accommodation” of religious minorities in Quebec, and parallel debates in other provinces and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One outcome of the Muhammad cartoons controversy has been an opportunity for comparative critical examination of public discourse on conceptions of citizenship and belonging vis-à-vis Muslim minorities in different national contexts. In this article, we focus upon the press reaction in two north-western European countries that on first appearance offer radically different cases. While Britain is a formerly imperial power where 'legitimate' public articulations of the collective 'we' must take stock of the sensibilities in this diverse inheritance, Denmark's emergence as a modern constitutional state is premised on a cultural, linguistic and ethnic homogeneity. It would only be fair to anticipate, therefore, that any comparison of press discourse on matters of religious minority toleration and respect for difference would herald very different outcomes to these traditions. Yet this article shows that, on closer inspection, Jyllands-Posten's more 'radical' approach marked a departure from other Danish newspapers in a manner that left it relatively isolated, and that the self-restraint shown by the British press in not reprinting the cartoons was far from universally supported, and subject to significant internal criticism. Indeed, the press discourse in both countries cast the reaction to the cartoons controversy by Muslims themselves as a sign of failed integration, and each moreover stressed a need for civility and respect - even where there was disagreement over the kinds of 'dialogue' that should take place. Nevertheless, significant divergences and cleavages remained, and the explanation for these differences rests not only on Britain's more 'multicultural' traditions, but also the experiences of the Rushdie affair and the subsequent debate that had already taken place in Britain. What is striking is the ways in which the Danish discourse appears to be plotting a course that is not that radically different from one taken in the British case, specifically the extent to which a recognition of religious minority sensibilities needs to be offset with a civic incorporation that is cast in interdependent terms in a way that is inclusive of - and not alienating to - Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]