December 3, 2021
Contact Can Reduce Conflict
What real-world conditions produce collaborative contact?
Examples:
How is Mohamed Salah playing for Liverpool similar to conditions laid out in contact hypothesis?
How is it different?
“Contact” that reaches far more people:
Beyond anecdotal accounts we’ve seen:
How would we know whether Mohamed Salah has reduced Islamophobia in Liverpool?
Compare changes in anti-Muslim hate crimes and Twitter posts:
If we create compare trends in every region in UK to “synthetic” versions of itself, Liverpool stands out
Compared to other places in UK, Liverpool after Salah saw
Inter-group contact can occur in trading relationships
Paralleling Lowe (2020), trading contact can be:
collaborative: if trade mutually benefits both groups
adversarial: if groups compete in the same markets
When two ethnic groups produce complementary goods and services:
Then inter-ethnic contact likely to be collaborative, not adversarial
In medieval India, Muslim traders and Hindu communities had complentary trade relationships (collaborative):
But this form of contact was concentrated in towns with direct acccess to the Indian Ocean
How do we know whether medieval Muslim trading communities reduced Hindu Muslim conflict?