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How State Capacity Matters: A Study Of The Cooptation And Coercion Of Religious Organizations In Southeast Asia And Beyond, Adam Howe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the complex relationship between state capacity, authoritarian regimes and religious organizations in Southeast Asia and beyond. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of secondary literatures in Comparative Politics, Sociology, and Religious Studies, complemented by archival research conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, this dissertation argues that relative state capacity endowment shapes the strategies that authoritarian regime elites employ against domestic religious organizations as a means of ensuring regime survival.

Through typological theory-building and a comparative case-study methodology, I argue that state capacity, imagined in terms of both bureaucratic/administrative and coercive components, influences whether authoritarian regime elites decide to pursue …