The concept of providential beliefs, which I introduce in my dissertation, has prompted a number of other research strands.
1. Terrorism and Religiously Motivated Political Violence
I contributed a chapter entitled ”Religiously-motivated Political Violence in Iraq” to a book entitled “The Sacred and Profane in Military Intervention: Religion and Conflict in the 21st Century” edited by Rosemary Durward and Lee Marsden and published by Ashgate (forthcoming 2010). This paper was originally presented at the British International Studies Association’s Working Group on International Relations, Security and Religion Conference “Engaging with Religion for Building Peace: the Experience of Afghanistan and Iraq,” held at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in November 2007.
An Instrument in God’s Hand: How Providential Belief Systems Motivate Religious Suicide Terrorism is the working title for a paper I presented at the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco in 2008 and am currently revising for submission.
TB vs. TNT: Understanding the Choice to Use Biological Weapons is a paper that came out of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Conflict’s Public Policy and Biological Threats Summer Training Program I attended at the University of California San Diego in 2007. In this paper, I use offense/defense theory, the providential beliefs approach introduced in my dissertation, and other theoretical tools to explain the choice of both state and non-state actors to acquire and use biological weapons. This paper is being revised for resubmission.
2. Religious Peacemaking
I was awarded the Graduate Research Award for Social Science Surveys by the University of California Santa Barbara in 2008. This grant allowed me to conduct surveys on religious peacemakers identified by the Tannenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. The data collection for this project was recently completed.
3. Providential Beliefs and Public Opinion Regarding Foreign Policies
In 2008, Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences accepted my proposal for surveys and experiments of the general public in order to test the predictions of the providential beliefs approach. The data collection for these surveys and experiments was recently completed. The original TESS proposal is available here: Religiosity, Providentiality, and Foreign Policy Approval. The results are included as part of my dissertation.
4. Framing
Finally, because the application of providential beliefs to any particular political issue requires the framing of that issue in terms of providential content, I have a couple of projects on framing in development. My coauthor in these endeavors is Amber Boydstun of the University of California Davis. Amber and I are currently revising a paper we presented at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting in 2008. This paper looks at how the media framed the war on terror, and how and why this changed over time.
We are also interested in comparing the framing dynamics of the media with presidential rhetoric on the topic of the war on terror. Data collection for this extension of the project is nearly complete.
