Costa Rican Pacific Coast, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) This article is part of our virtual symposium and essay series, “Masking Religious Freedom Violations.” Read more here. In 2006, Brian Grim and Roger Finke noted that religion was largely absent from international quantitative studies, partly due to a lack of high-quality data. Today, this gap…
Makoko Lagos, Nigeria by Collins Okoh (CC BY-SA 4.0) A longstanding debate in the social sciences concerns whether violence in civil conflicts targets specific groups or is indiscriminate. Security scholar Stathis Kalyvas, in his 2006 seminal book The Logic of Violence in Civil War, argues that indiscriminate violence is less likely when actors have high…
Casa de la Libertad (Freedom House) in Sucre, Bolivia by Dan Lundberg (CC BY-SA 2.0). The Growing Sophistication of Religious Freedom Monitoring When considering research and political attention for religious freedom, we have really come a long way. For a long time, secularization theory was dominant in social sciences. Back in the nineteenth century, German…
Lagos, Nigeria by Nupo Deyon Daniel on Unsplash. Nigeria is a multi-ethnic and culturally diverse federation of 36 autonomous states and the Federal Capital Territory. The political landscape is partly dominated by the ruling All Progressives Congress party (APC), which controls the executive arm of government and holds majority seats at both the Senate and…
Religion in Isla Margarita, Valle del Espíritu Santo by Wilfredor (CC0 1.0). This essay seeks to illustrate the state of religious freedom in Venezuela by analyzing the factors that affect its free exercise. First, it describes the presence of religious communities in the country and their relationship with the government. Second, it reviews the regulatory…
“Cristo Church, Havana, Cuba” by Roberts & Co., Havana (CC0). The Regulation of Religion in Communist Cuba Religious groups have been viewed with suspicion by the Cuban government for a long time, as they are seen as potential threats to the socialist state. This distrust has led to subtle forms of repression, such as surveillance…