How youth camps helped build social cohesion in India

Intergroup conflict is a significant policy challenge globally. It takes many forms, from ethno-nationalist political movements (Steinmayr 2021) to prejudice against refugees (Chatruc and Rozo 2024) and new tensions driven by climate stress (McGuirk and Nunn 2025). In India, where 80% of the population is Hindu and 14% is Muslim, deep-rooted social divisions exist along religious lines. Muslims face systematic discrimination and are often residentially segregated (Wilkinson 2006, Gaikwad and Nellis 2021). Meanwhile, youth participation in communal violence is growing (HRW 2024, Maitra 2025).

Researchers have studied a variety of interventions to improve relations between ethnic and religious communities, including perspective-taking (Chatruc and Rozo 2024), peer conversations (Webb 2024), and edutainment interventions (Siddique et al. 2024). In recent research (Ghosh, Kundu, Lowe, and Nellis 2025), we highlight the promise of integrated youth camps as a path forward.

Youth camps as tools to strengthen cohesion

Camps have long been employed as instruments of nation-building and youth socialisation, for good and for ill. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union hosted 10 million children annually in camps designed to instil socialist ideology. Similarly, in Nigeria, the National Youth Service Corps, established in 1973 to promote post-war reconciliation, enrols around 200,000 recruits every year.

Three main features of youth camps may foster togetherness: 

1. Sociologists have argued that collective rituals, such as wearing uniforms and singing anthems, can create a state of ‘collective effervescence’, establishing a shared sense of identity among participants (Durkheim 1912, Turner 1977, Henrich 2020, Xygalatas 2022).
2. Integrated camps give rise to opportunities for collaborative contact with ethnic outgroups, which has been shown to improve intergroup relations (Allport 1954, Lowe 2021, Grady et al. 2023).
3. Programmatic content can be tailored to promote inclusive ideas and delivered to captive audiences of impressionable young people (Dhar et al. 2022). By combining ritual, contact, and instruction, youth camps may thus offer a powerful means of cultivating social cohesion.

Studying the impact of youth camps in India

We implemented a randomised controlled trial with 412 boys aged 13-18 from low-income Hindu and Muslim families in West Bengal. We randomly assigned participants to one of two 12-day camps or to a pure control arm. Both camps featured team sports, lectures and discussions on democracy and diversity, and other recreational activities. One camp also incorporated ritual elements borrowed from real-world settings, such as singing the national anthem, reciting a pledge, wearing colourful uniforms, chanting support during sports matches, and dancing in unison.

We measured outcomes through daily camp surveys that tracked emotions and relationships, a detailed in-person survey conducted six weeks after the camps ended, and a short phone survey one year later.

Lesson 1: Youth camps improved Hindu-Muslim relations and well-being

Reduced religious bias. Six weeks after the camps ended, campers showed more prosocial behaviour towards religious outgroups. In behavioural games, participants in the control group gave 6% in donations to outgroup strangers than ingroup strangers. We find that camps eliminated this bias altogether, with campers giving roughly equal amounts to both groups.

Increased outgroup friendships. For control participants, only one in 25 of the average participant’s friends belonged to the outgroup, despite one-third of their classmates being outgroup members. Camps doubled the number of outgroup friends and also increased participants’ willingness to pay to attend a social event in which they would play board games with an outgroup stranger.

Lasting impacts. More than one year later, 73% of campers reported maintaining contact with children they met at camp. At this point, campers still had twice as many outgroup friendships as control participants; in other words, the friendship effect of the camps persisted almost entirely. Remarkably, over half of the long-term friendship effect came from new outgroup friends made after the camps, showing that campers had expanded their social networks.

Improved well-being. Campers reported being happier, less depressed, and more satisfied with their social lives six weeks after camps ended, despite the camps not being explicitly designed to target mental health.

No attitude change. Despite behavioural changes, camps didn't shift self-reported attitudes on intermarriage, citizenship for outgroups, or support for polarising politicians. This aligns with recent research showing that prejudice-reduction interventions often change behaviour without changing attitudes (Paluck et al. 2021, Clochard 2024).

Lesson 2: Not all camp components are equally effective

To understand which features of camps matter, we cross-randomised collective rituals (across the two camp arms) and the intensity of intergroup contact, through random assignment of campers to teams with five Hindus and five Muslims, or teams with eight Hindus and two Muslims. To understand the impact of civic education, we use variation in whether a camper attended lecture days versus non-lecture days.

Rituals had fleeting effects. Boys in the ritual camp felt more connected to their fellow campers and were more excited during the camp. However, six weeks later, outcomes were similar for the ritual and non-ritual campers. Thus, our suite of rituals, which are characteristic of youth socialisation efforts in the wild, does not account for the unifying effects of the camps.

Contact increased friendships. Campers in high-contact teams formed substantially more outgroup friendships, fully accounting for camps’ overall friendship effects.

Civic education shapes social preferences. Attending lectures on democracy and inclusion substantially increased prosocial preferences, indicating that the camp curriculum helped persuade campers of the merits of social inclusion.

Lesson 3: What works for one group can backfire for another

While camps benefited both Hindu and Muslim campers overall, the effects of rituals and contact went in opposite directions across the two groups.

Rituals worked for Hindus but not Muslims. Rituals made Hindu boys more prosocial towards Muslims and increased their psychological well-being. But they reduced the prosocial preferences of Muslim campers, lowering their willingness to play with outgroup strangers and causing them to attend almost two fewer camp days on average. This pattern suggests that rituals may be more fulfilling – generating more positive camp experiences – when performed with ingroups (as camps were majority Hindu).

High contact backfired for Hindus but worked for Muslims. Hindu campers in high-contact teams were less likely to endorse an inclusive national identity and less willing to interact with an outgroup stranger than those in low-contact teams. This is the first experimental evidence that even collaborative contact can sometimes backfire (Paluck et al. 2019, Clochard 2024). Muslim boys, on the other hand, benefited from being in high-contact teams and made more outgroup friends. These effects are consistent with the idea that unusually high exposure to Muslims in teams with equal representation triggers perceptions of outgroup threat for Hindus (Enos 2016).

Policy implications for social cohesion

Our findings indicate that low-cost youth camps in divided societies can have a lasting impact, reducing intergroup bias, cementing outgroup friendships, and boosting mental health.

Yet, the design challenge is real: different features work for the majority and minority. Rituals showed no lasting benefits and alienated minority participants. High contact intensity backfired for the majority. Future programmes may be able to address these tensions through more immersive residential camps, complementing existing work on exposure to outgroup roommates at university (Corno et al. 2022). Otherwise, we find suggestive evidence that exposure to our lectures, which focused on democracy, fostered more positive attitudes towards democratic values. Thus, lesson content explicitly addressing tolerance, such as inclusive citizenship policies, may be more effective in changing attitudes. Finally, more extreme rituals involving costly signals of loyalty rather than purely symbolic gestures may also prove more effective (Aronson and Mills 1959, Xygalatas et al. 2013).

Policymakers should pilot programmes carefully before scaling, as youth camps can be a powerful tool for social cohesion in divided societies, but only if designed carefully to build bridges rather than reinforce divisions.

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