A Calendar of Conflicts? Intersecting Holidays, Identity, & Intergroup Violence

• In Event: The Intergroup Politics of Identity and Conflict

Abstract

Does the simultaneous rise in nationalist and religious sentiment lead to intergroup conflict? Existing research posits that the heightened salience of group identities can serve as a trigger to the onset and escalation of violent aggression in heterogeneous societies. Yet, it is unclear whether conflict is more likely when the salience of both national and subgroup religious identities—often competing—simultaneously increases during the same period. Furthermore, examining this question is challenging as the rise in national and subgroup religious identities, as well as violence, could be determined by the same underlying factors. We overcome these challenges by exploiting exogenous variation in the salience of nationalist and religious identities, drawing on a novel global data set of national and religious holidays and combining it with geocoded high-frequency panel data on local conflicts. Our identification strategy relies on the fact that the lunar Muslim calendar moves backward nine days each year relative to the solar Gregorian calendar, creating variation in the coincidence of Muslim holidays with non-Muslim or national holidays and, therefore, the joint salience in national and religious identities. Our analysis shows that intergroup violence is significantly more likely when holidays intersect. By analyzing a harmonized data set of global public opinion surveys, we show that these findings are indeed driven by heightened identity salience and ingroup identification.

Authors

• Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, Brown University

• Donghyun Danny Choi, Brown University

• Nicholas Sambanis, Yale University