Julia Köbrich’s research while affiliated with German Institute for Global and Area Studies and other places

Preferences to interact with similar others are a barrier to positive intergroup contact and, thus, peaceful intergroup relations. A growing literature investigated what shapes contact preferences but more research on changeable factors that can be targeted by interventions is needed. In this article, we focused on preferences for interacting with religiously similar others. To create an interface between practice and research, our hypotheses on changeable determinants of preferences are informed by qualitative interviews on everyday practices of peaceful coexistence in Togo and Sierra Leone. We expected inclusive religious ideas, adaptive coping and emotion regulation skills, and knowledge of outgroup religious practices to be related to weaker preferences for similar others. Further, we argued these associations may vary depending on neighborhood levels of interreligious peace. We tested our hypotheses using survey data ( N = 1828) collected among Muslims and Christians in 50 neighborhoods of Lomé (Togo) and Freetown (Sierra Leone). We found that inclusive ideas and knowledge of outgroup practices were associated with weaker, and exclusive ideas with stronger, preferences for similar others. These findings mostly held across groups and countries. Coping and emotion regulation skills did not matter systematically and our hypotheses about the role of neighborhood‐level peace was refuted.

Rising religious violence makes it imperative to develop strategies to foster and preserve interreligious peace. We examine the role of descriptive and injunctive pro-mixing ingroup norms in explaining interreligious contact and, indirectly, more favorable interreligious attitudes. Ingroup norms have been argued to affect intergroup contact independently of individual preferences through mechanisms of social control and indirectly via the internalization of the norms in one’s own preferences. However, the relation between ingroup norms and individual preferences is rarely investigated, and it is unknown whether these two mechanisms matter differently for positive and negative contact. We conducted two studies (N1 = 678, N2 = 1,831) in Togo and Sierra Leone to determine whether ingroup norms predict positive and negative interreligious contact directly, indirectly via individual preferences, or via both mechanisms, and how this then translates to intergroup attitudes. We also explored whether the processes were comparable between countries and for religious majority and minority members. We found that descriptive and injunctive norms both mattered for interreligious contact. While for descriptive pro-mixing norms, direct mechanisms of social control were more pronounced, injunctive norms were related to interreligious contact and attitudes via preferences for similar others through internalization processes.

Interreligious relations remain an important dimension of human coexistence and we currently observe an increase in religiously motivated violence and discrimination. Hence, we need to better understand determinants of interreligious peace. Building on a new concept of interreligious peace which includes but exceeds the absence of interreligious physical violence, we provide a systematic review of 83 quantitative empirical studies examining religious determinants of interreligious physical violence, hostile attitudes, threat perceptions, trust, and cooperation. We find that religious ideas foster or hinder interreligious peace depending on their content. Religious identities have negative effects but must be considered in context. Evidence regarding the role of religious practice is mixed and the role of religious actors and institutions remains understudied. Our results show the need for (1) more conceptual clarity, (2) replications in different contexts, (3) research on dimensions of religion beyond identities, and (4) a better integration of different strands of literature.

In some precolonial regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, queen mothers ruled alongside kings. Yet, women were dislodged from leadership positions over time. Today, many countries are discussing how to boost the number of women in politics and business. Some sub-Saharan African countries are already among the top 25 in terms of proportion of women in parliament, and boast above-average percentages of women on corporate boards. How did women become leaders in these sectors?