Do appeals to overarching identities reduce the willingness for interreligious violence? Evidence from a survey experiment in Sierra Leone and Togo

Interreligious relations remain an important dimension of human coexistence. We currently observe an increase in religiously motivated violence and discrimination. Hence, we need to better understand what drives interreligious peace. Drawing on a newly compiled global dataset, which includes information on 172 countries between 1990 and 2014, we identified two cases with high levels of interreligious peace despite unfavourable conditions: Sierra Leone and Togo. We run survey experiments with 2,000 participants in Freetown and Lomé to test in a between-subject design whether appeals to (1) individual identites, (2) an overarching religious identity and (3) an overarching national identity reduce the willingness to use violence to defend the religious group compared to a control group.