Secularism and Ethnic Minorities: Comparative Case Studies on Ethnic, Religious, and Political Cognitions in Pakistani-Controlled Kashmir, Central Russia, Romania, and Northern Scandinavia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think this is an interesting study. It studies 'social secularism' by analysing a number of cases. It defines its theses on an anthropological perspective, which is indeed critical. I think the paper has a high merit. However, I have two suggestions, hoping that they would enhance the article.

1. In the beginning, the author should provide more detail debate about secularism and particularly on social secularism. As it is, the paper is rather compact on this topic. the content of the paper requires a more rigorous theoretical debate on secularism.

2. For each case study: the author should provide more detail about his/her methods in observing the local people.  Did he/she use some statistical data? Or interviews? Those details should also be incorporated into the main body.

Author Response

thank you for your review, comments, and suggestions. I fully agree with your opinion. I extended my paper in three ways:

1. I added a new paragraph and some additional inserts to the first part of my paper with having more outline on the secularization thesis and its critics, focusing on those contributions that were useful for my research. 
2. I added more details about my research and analytical methods, the statistics I used, and the archives I created from my digital ethnographical files. I did not put it into the main text to avoid the overload of contents, but I put these additional data in footnotes linking to these topics.
3. I extended the bibliography with some scholarly works on secularism, referred in the extended part of my paper deals with theoretical and methodological issues.

Thank you again for your help in improving my paper's quality. 

Kind regards,

Reviewer 2 Report

It is worth continuing the research, which should result in a monograph.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer (2),

thank you for your review, I fully accept your opinion. I continue my research and comparison after publishing this paper to create a complex analysis with more theoretical and methodological contents (including some more case studies as well) to elaborate it into a monograph on this topic.

Kind regards,