A New Approach to Reduce Inter-Religious Violence
Dehumanization – perceiving other people as less than human – has accompanied mass atrocities and conflict throughout history. Why? Dehumanization removes the moral prohibition against violence, genocide, and systemic discrimination – thereby enabling them to occur. Leaders use dehumanizing rhetoric as a tool to normalize group-targeted harm of vulnerable populations.
Many groups – ranging from Black Lives Matter to the UN Special Envoy on the Prevention of Genocide – recognize dehumanization as a critical factor to be addressed. Still, they have limited evidence-based tools to detect, disrupt it, and prevent its harmful consequences.
Research led by Beyond Conflict and our scientific partners with over 10,000 people in 12 countries helped identify the psychological processes and brain mechanisms that underlie and shape dehumanization. The research found that in every cultural context surveyed, at least one group was significantly dehumanized, and blatant dehumanization was one of the strongest predictors of intergroup hostility in every country examined. It predicted attitudes and policy support related to targeting civilians, support for collective punishment, and war. These insights are in a policy brief for practitioners and policymakers, released by Beyond Conflict in 2019, that advances understanding of dehumanization and suggests real-world applications for violence prevention. Following this policy brief release, we began to pilot a new intervention in Nigeria to detect and reduce dehumanization between Christians and Muslims.Understanding and Countering Dehumanization in Nigeria
Since 1999, over 10,000 Nigerians have been killed in clashes between Muslims and Christians according to data from the U.S. State Department. Particularly in the Middle Basin and northern part of the country, lives were lost, homes destroyed, and mosques and churches burned due to this inter-religious conflict.- Despite high levels of dehumanization and threat perceptions, Christians and Muslims were willing to interact with each other and said many positive things about each other.
- The program effectively reduced support for inter-religious violence and animosity between Christians and Muslims. This included reducing the perception of the other group as a threat and associating them with negative traits such as violence, immorality and fanaticism.
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