Religion for Peace: Investigating Messengers and Messages for Interreligious Peace

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This proposal seeks a renewal project for the DFG-funded project "Religion for Peace: Identifying Conditions and Mechanisms of Interfaith Peace". The original project investigated conditions and mechanisms of peaceful interreligious relations in a nested research design. Applying a novel conceptualization of interreligious peace in a global quantitative analysis, the project first identified unfavorable conditions for interreligious peace such as reinforcing cleavages or previous violent conflict. In a next step, the project team selected Togo and Sierra Leone as unlikely success cases where interreligious peace is high despite unfavorable conditions. Qualitative analyses as well as survey and experimental studies conducted in the case countries highlighted the role religious leaders can play as messengers for interreligious peace. Yet, new questions regarding the comparative effectiveness of religious leaders as peace messengers and effective content of peace messages were also raised. Knowledge on peace messengers and messages needs to be: (1) broadened by (re)testing our findings and new hypotheses in different contexts and (2) deepened regarding the causal effects of interventions. The proposed renewal project requests additional funding for two years to address two objectives: First, data will be collected to study the (comparative) effectiveness of religious leaders as peace messengers and effective content of peace messages in four additional cases where interreligious peace is comparably low and background conditions are favorable or unfavorable (i.e., Austria, Greece, Iraq, and Kenya). Studying these additional cases is important because individual-level mechanisms of how messengers and messages matter for interreligious peace may differ in these settings compared to in the unlikely success cases studied in the original project. Second, the causal effects of interventions informed by our research on peace messengers and messages (e.g., advocacy and social media training) on interreligious peace will be tested. Building on contact established with a civil society organization that aims to counteract dynamics of declining interreligious peace in Togo, our team has the unique possibility to co-design interventions and to evaluate their effects on interreligious peace. These intervention studies answer questions of causality central to research on the religion-peace link and provide peacebuilding practitioners with concrete indications on programs that can affect interreligious peace.