Ethnic Conflicts: Developing a Comprehensive Cultural Index

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 PhD in Sociology, Researcher of Iranian Social Issues. Tehran, Iran

3 Department of Social Sciences, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In the prevailing currents of sociology and political science, the primary emphasis has traditionally leaned towards the examination of institutions, elite actors, and foreign interventions as explanatory factors for ethnic and religious conflicts. However, cultural sociology and the sociology of culture have introduced an alternative perspective, providing an additional lens through which to understand this phenomenon. These branches of study underscore the significance of cultural factors and value systems, shedding light on their pivotal role in the genesis of such conflicts. However, investigating the causal relationship between the cultural and value systems of societies and their respective developments with ethnic-religious conflicts requires a precise standard to measure it.
Value and attitude Data underwent both theoretical and statistical refinement. Furthermore, a comprehensive ten-year longitudinal study systematically examined the empirical relationship between the cultural index and ethnoreligious conflicts. The initial phase of this longitudinal investigation involved 81 countries, followed by an expanded sample of 93 countries in the second round. Finally, through the aggregation of the entire dataset, the relationship between the cultural index and ethnoreligious conflicts was thoroughly measured.
The findings indicate the cohesion of the conflict index comprised of four foundational cultural factors—embeddedness, intolerance, masculinity, and the sense of being chosen.
Results reveal that this conflict index has demonstrated the capacity to elucidate a substantial portion of activism rooted in ethnicity and religion, whether directed against the other or manifested in conflicts between the government and ethnic/religious groups. The regression analysis indicates that approximately 40 percent of the variations in country-level conflicts can be predicted by the cultural factors inherent in the conflict index.

Keywords

References

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