Lineaments of Support for Suicide Terrorism Among Indonesians : A Replication Study

Indonesia is generally viewed as a moderate Muslim nation that episodically struggles with terrorism. Between 1981 and the end of 2016, Indonesia experienced 156 attacks from some 15 Islamist militant groups. However, the lineaments of popular support for Islamist militancy in Indonesia remain understudied. In this paper, we expand upon the existing literature on popular support for Islamist violence in Indonesia by replicating and extending the empirical framework for modeling the relationship between support for various conceptualizations of Shari'a and support for Islamist violence offered by Fair, Littman and Nugent (2018) for Pakistan and extended to Bangladesh by Fair, Hamza and Heller (2017). To do so, we conduct ordered logistical regression analysis of Pew survey data which includes information about respondents' religious beliefs and practice as well as support for Islamist violence. We find considerable evidence that their framework is useful for understanding support for violence in Indonesia