Violent conflict and hostility towards ethno-religious outgroups in Nigeria

Although Nigeria has a high incidence of violent conflict and is divided along ethno-religious lines, no study has, to the best of my knowledge, examined the effect of violent conflict on hostility towards ethnic and religious outgroups using representative data for Nigeria, nor the differential effects of violent conflict on outgroup hostility among Nigeria’s Muslim and Christian populations. This study does so. To measure outgroup hostility, I developed an additive indicator by combining the responses to two survey questions probing the respondents’ willingness to have people from other religions and ethnic groups as neighbors. I measured exposure to violent conflict using the total number of conflict incidents within the 30km buffer around the respondents’ dwellings. The instrumental variable regression results showed that among Nigeria’s population, violent conflict has a positive effect on outgroup hostility. A plausible mechanism through which this occurs is that violent conflict erodes trust and makes ethnic and religious fault lines salient, which in turn leads to outgroup hostility. When I broke down the data based on religious affiliation and estimated some models using the Muslim and Christian subsamples of respondents, the analysis showed that violent conflict has a positive effect on outgroup hostility among Christians. These results are robust to alternative operationalizations of outgroup hostility, different buffer sizes, and different estimation techniques. Among Muslims, violent conflict rather had a weak positive effect; however, this result was not robust to alternative operationalizations of outgroup hostility.