Are Pious Protesters Powerful? : A quantitative analysis assessing the effect of religious support on the success of unarmed civil resistance campaigns

There is an ample body of literature which seek to investigate the role of religion in armed conflict. Yet, the role of religion in unarmed civil resistance has not received an equal amount of scholarly attention. Apart from some single and comparative case studies showcasing the pertinent role of religion on nonviolent campaign success, little has been done to investigate its effect across broader cases. By conducting a large-N analysis of 143 nonviolent campaigns from 1975 to 2013 globally, this study aims to fill in the research gap and answer the following question: How does religious support affect the success of nonviolent campaigns? Furthermore, this study seeks to investigate whether unique forms of religious support, i.e. traditional support and religiopolitical support, have a different effect on nonviolent campaign success. The results indicate that religious support does not have a statistically significant effect on the success of nonviolent campaigns. The study also reveals that religious support type does not have a statistically different effect on the chance of nonviolent campaign success. Thus, this study challenges the generalizability of case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of religiously-supported nonviolent campaigns. Avenues for future research include conducting a large-N study on the effect of religious support on the level of mass mobilisation and the resilience capacity of nonviolent campaigns