Concluding Remarks
While Christian and Muslim youth are not in a permanent stage of manifest conflict, their relationships are nevertheless shaped by mutual prejudices, hostilities, and in-group bias.
For the Muslim minority in the Philippines, experiences of minorization and marginalization through time have stimulated them to focus on the positive side of their, increasingly important, ethno-religious identities. Muslim children and youth seek positive identification with their ethno-religious group in order to achieve solidarity and form a common basis for struggle and resistance to threat and criticism against their politicized collective Moro identity.We have tried to contribute to a better understanding of latent intergroup conflict among Christian and Muslim children and youth in the Philippines through various theoretical lenses such as realistic conflict theory, ethnic group conflict theory, youth bulge theory, and identity theories. Typically, research on the conflict and peace situation in the Philippines looks at the manifest dimensions of the conflict with focus on the armed conflict between the Philippine government and ideologically motivated armed groups. This is not surprising, since the protracted nature of the conflict and its widespread economic and social costs has caused profound psychosocial harm and insecurity at individual and societal levels. This contribution has broadened the discourse on the discordant context of Filipino children and youth by looking at latent conflicts between Christians and Muslims and their political, economic, and social dimensions. The main implication of these findings for the theory and practice of peace building is that respect for people’s sense of distinctiveness and differentiation as members of a group is vital to any peace-building initiative.