Suicide attacks and religious cleavages

Many experts claim that religious cleavages are one of the major reasons for suicide attacks. To test this hypothesis, we investigate whether the total number of suicide attacks per violent conflict and the annual number of suicide attacks per country are associated with simmering religious conflicts. We distinguish between two kinds of religious cleavages: cleavages at the macro level between the groups engaged in violent conflicts and cleavages at the micro or battlefield level between the actual perpetrators and victims of suicide attacks. Our results do not indicate that religious cleavages are an important precondition for the incidence of suicide attacks over the period 1981-2010.