Religion for Peace: Investigating Messengers and Messages for Interreligious Peace

The project will take two approaches to advancing research on messengers and messages for interreligious peace. First, quantitative data will be collected in four cases where interreligious peace is comparably low and background conditions are favorable or unfavorable using online surveys and an experiment. We consider Austria, Greece, Iraq, and Kenya as potential case countries. Thereby, the project will extend research conducted at the GIGA as part of the project "Religion for Peace: Identifying Conditions and Mechanisms of Interfaith Peace" in which we conducted studies in two positive examples of interreligious peace in 2022, namely Togo and Sierra Leone.
Second, the effects of interventions vis-à-vis the promotion of interreligious peace will be evaluated rigorously using experimental methods. In an intervention study, a treatment group that participates in an intervention is compared to a control group that did not participate. Intervention studies are an important tool for research to investigate whether interventions, like advocacy campaigns or social media training, have causal effects on social phenomena such as interreligious peace. Designing and evaluating interventions is also important for peacebuilding practitioners, as intervention studies give them concrete indications on which kinds of programs can affect interreligious peace.