Nationalist and Ethno-religious Dynamics (NERD)

A major source of political activity, as well as violent conflict, is generated by nationalist movements, ethnic and religious-based groups. Our working group, Nationalist and Ethno-religious Dynamics (NERD), seeks to better understand the role of religion and ethnicity in collective political action, variations in patterns of behavior by such groups, their interactions with states and other international actors, their influence on the promotion or violation of human rights, and the sources and impact of their motivations and capacities for organization and any subsequent political action. The group features a mix of disciplines, substantive foci, methodological approaches, and area expertise. Faculty regularly collaborate and co-author with graduate students, and have a successful, strong record of winning external grants to fund their research, and are affiliated with a variety of research centers at ASU: Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, Center on the Future of War, Center for Jewish Studies, the Melikian Center on Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and the Pat Tillman Veterans Center, to name a few. They also have affiliations and memberships in research and academic organizations nationally and internationally.

Visit the dedicated NERD webpage 

Visit the Ethnic and Religious Conflict Conference Website

• With the support of SPGS and the Center for Studies of Religion and Conflict at ASU, our Working Group organized an international Conference on Ethnic and Religious Conflict that took place in February 2015 at ASU. The conference, attended by leading scholars in political science, sociology, anthropology and history, analyzed the implications of these different kinds of groups for political mobilization, violence and conflict. It sought to  answer questions such as these: What are the salient differences between ethnicity and religion for group identity and mobilization?  What features of each might lead to conflict and why?  Do religious or ethnic groups form more readily? Which kind of group is likely to be longer-lived, and why? In societies where ethnicity and religion are essentially uncorrelated, which group identity is likely to trump its alternative and under what conditions? Is conflict along ethnic or religious lines more common, more deadly, or more difficult to terminate? Is there anything inherent in religion or ethnicity that is more conducive to peaceful political mobilization or more prone to violence? Are the conditions under which intergroup conflict erupts similar in both kinds of groups? Are the causal mechanisms that lead to conflict between ethnic groups different than those leading to conflict between religious groups? When does it make more sense to conceptualize ethnic and religious groups separately rather than to treat them as substitutable manifestations of status groups that are comparable across societies?

Papers from the conference are being published in a variety of academic journals, including that of faculty members Siroky and Hechter:  David S. Siroky, Sean Mueller and Michael Hechter, "Cultural legacies, political preferences and ecological effects: Explaining the failure of Jurassic separatism in Switzerland,” European Political Science Review, 2016, forthcoming. Other publications from the workshop include Nils-Christian Bormann, Lars-Erik Cederman and Manuel Vogt, “Language, Religion, and Ethnic Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution. Forthcoming. Published online before print August 24, 2015, doi: 10.1177/0022002715600755;  

Rogers Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence,” Sociological Theory (2015), 33(1) 1–19; John McCauley and  Daniel N. Posner. “African Borders as Sources of Natural Experiments: Promise and Pitfalls.” Political Science Research and Methods (2015) 3 (2): 409-418.