The Effect of Relative Deprivation on Political Violence Using the Boolean Analysis (A Comparative Study of Muslim Middle Eastern Countries)

The present paper, takes country as a unit of analysis, and relies on the Boolean algebra to answer the following question: what combinations of indicators of relative deprivation lead to generate political violence? The relative deprivation theoretical approach, on the basis of certain arguments, predicts that political violence is more likely to occur in countries that suffer from both diachronic and synchronic deprivations. This paper is an attempt to empirically test the above hypothesis based on the theories of relative deprivation with regard to the Middle Eastern Muslim countries in a period of twenty years. The paper employs the Boolean analysis technique. The results of Boolean analysis show that during the period under study, two different causal patterns of deprivation have led to political violence in the Middle Eastern Muslim countries. The first is the combination of strong ethnic-group discrimination and low economic inequality; and the second is the combination of strong ethnic-group discrimination and rapid development. On the other hand, theoretical achievements based on the Boolean minimization show that among the countries under study, the occurrence of political violence is not related to economic inequality. Group discrimination is also a necessary cause for political violence, that is, all the countries experiencing political violence have had group discrimination.