News reports of clashes between Muslims and Christians in countries such as Nigeria are increasingly common. Yet, interreligious violence erupts only in some communities but not others. Under what conditions does religious identity become the fault line of communal violence? We argue that informal power-sharing institutions on the communal level are essential in shaping the incentives of potential perpetrators. We provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence for our claim that districts in which informal power-sharing agreements exist are less likely to experience interreligious violence. We conducted interviews with community leaders in 38 Nigerian districts to trace the process by which local power-sharing institutions exert influence on actors’ incentives to engage in religious violence. We complement this with quantitative analyses of a new dataset capturing interreligious violence on a subnational level. The analyses show that the overall degree of interreligious violence is significantly lower in districts with power-sharing than in those without. We also identify two causal mechanisms through which informal power-sharing institutions operate. First, these institutions affect the incentives of elites to appeal for cooperation. We show that the rhetoric of elites in districts with power-sharing is significantly more conciliatory. Second, power-sharing affects the general population’s perception of the interreligious tensions. Individuals living in districts with power-sharing institutions are less likely to experience religious diversity as threatening. Local-level informal power-sharing institutions are therefore an important foundation for communal peace and interreligious cooperation.
In an ethnically and religiously divided community that has experienced recent violence. The discussion is based on a summer 2016 survey experiment we conducted in Jos, Nigeria, to gather information regarding residents' perceptions of local communal violence. We discuss the challenges of such research and our approach to randomized sampling, constructing treatments that minimize the stress to respondents, debriefing to lower the possibility of spreading rumors of conflict, and utilizing computer tablets to increase access to the study for respondents with varying languages and levels of literacy. In particular, we discuss a geographic sampling method used for randomization, which we hope will prove useful to others facing similar randomization challenges.
Where ethnic violence divides groups by both religious and tribal affiliation, how does the 'ethnic' characterization of conflict affect perceptions of the crises? From a survey experiment in Jos, Nigeria, we find that priming respondents with religious versus tribal conflict frames leads respondents to differently interpret the causes of violence, with religious issues viewed as the most salient cause of violence and religion the most important solution. The findings emphasize that where more than one ethnic identity is salient to conflict, the causes of violence take on different meaning depending on how individuals interpret the ethnic dimension of local violence.
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