Journal of Religion and Violence

To René Girard, religion is not a source of violence but rather one of the most widespread means to reduce violence. It even preserved archaic societies from self-destruction and worked in the same mode for most of history. The article tries to depict this mechanism and to explain its paradoxical nature, which is the taming of violence by violent means. Further on, functional equivalents are shown, which become necessary because of the enlightenment triggered by the biblical revelation and other axial-age-dynamisms.

The following article starts with the horror and terror that have been caused be recent terrorist attacks like the mass murder of 9/11 or the Norway massacre from 2011. From a Western perspective suicide terrorism is especially terrifying. In a first part of his article Palaver tries to show that suicide terrorism, despite our first reaction to it, is a rational phenomenon that has to be understood precisely in order to respond to this challenge properly. Drawing on the work of LouiseRichardson and other experts on terrorism he shows that traditional forms of military sacrifices that have forced people to die for their country is much closer to suicide terrorism than we think at first sight. By using René Girard’s mimetic theory, Palaver’s second part focuses on the complex relationship between religion and violence. He especially emphasizes the danger that follows the Abrahamic overcoming of the scapegoat mechanism – the Abrahamic revolution parting from the world of human sacrifice – if the solidarity with the victims is disconnected from forgiveness. In the third part Palaver turns to an alternative model of how we can respond to injustice and oppression by emphasizing a still often overlooked legacy of the Abrahamic tradition that avoids the dangers that characterizecontemporary terrorism. From this perspective, non-violence, forgiveness, and the love of enemies become important criteria for martyrdom and resistance.

This article evaluates the issue of religion and conflict in international relations. René Girard’s mimetic theory offers explanations for basic problems of the ‘new world order’: why violence is a persistent pattern in human and political conduct as well as the understanding of religion and conflict. Therefore the article, after an assessment of framing religion and conflict in the context of theoretical approaches to political science, evaluates the possibilities of mimetic theory to provide a new understanding of the nexus of religion and conflict in international relations. It will do so in arguing for the hypothesis that the mimetic theory provides insights to the interplay of the evolving of power as it is described by the Realist tradition of international relations. The power of the ‘zealots,’ is the power of mimetic desire, which always threatens to bring people apart.

The notion of apocalypse is the unifying architecture of Rene Girard’s theory of history. The terrible paradox that motivates Girard is the inner affinity between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, progress and the disintegration of stable order, revelation and violence. In this essay, I look at three dimensions of Girard’s vision of the “end of history”: The first is the rise of “victimology” and its idioms in Western culture (and now their globalization) since the end of World War II, signaling the collapse of Western ethics through their own truth. The second is Girard’s image of the end of history in terms of the “return of the archaic,” a relapse into the chaos of the evolutionary beginnings of the human at the summit of cultural achievement. As moral distinctions crumble, the polarities of political life become more brittle and violent. And the last is to indicate (however sketchily) Girard’s relation to a modern tradition of apocalyptic thought that includes Pascal andRousseau, Marx and Sartre, and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. As with his recent appropriation of Carl von Clausewitz, he aims both to finish and to finish off this tradition by bringing it back to its Christian underpinnings.

In this article I will focus on the recent developments in Islam in Chechnya in terms of the question, “How do we understand the radicalization of Islam in Chechnya in terms of the conflicts in the 1990s?” As a way of sorting this out, I will be making reference to Monica Duffy Toft’s discussion of the conditionsthat increase the probability of a civil war becoming a religious war, and her analysis of the role religion can play in such conflicts. There are elements of her analysis that I do not use, and in the latter part of this article I will argue that one component of her approach – namely her essentialization of religion and itsconnection with violence – is misconceived.

This article highlights the impact of endtime representations in relation to concepts of an apocalyptic enemy. Apocalyptic violence, as related here, involves three parties: Jewish Temple activists, Christian Zionists and their common apocalyptic enemy, Islam. Violence is always present in endtime representations, but it does not necessarily involve physical confrontation. Violence has a double nature. René Girard calls it a two-edged sword, which can be used to oppress as well as to liberate. The role prescribed by Christian Zionists (CZ) to the Jewish Third Temple activists and vice versa is here addressed in light of Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as presented in Violence and the Sacred [1977] (2005) and in Leppäkari’s previous studies, such as, Apocalyptic Representations of Jerusalem (2006) and Hungry for Heaven (2008). Here the double nature of violence accounts for the point that violence can stain or cleanse, contaminate or purify, drive humans to fury and murder or appease their anger and restore them to life. When set in an apocalyptic context the double nature of violence enables dissemination of images of threat and xenophobia, yielding physical confrontation.

Through an analysis of the journal Cristianismo y Revolución (Buenos Aires, 1966-1971), this paper highlights the conditions that made the link between certain Catholic groups and revolutionary movements possible during the Sixties in Argentina. The changes in Christian conscience characterized by the attempts the Catholic Church made during the twentieth century to face the Modern era, and by developing a concern for structural social problems, were the primary influences that led some Catholics to the Left. Moral concern with the poor, the success of the Cuban Revolution and the political situation in Argentina and throughout Latin America laid the foundation for revolutionary activity.

The relationship between sovereign violence, constitutional language, territorial claims, and certain human rights such as the freedom of religion plays out in complex ways in China-Tibet relations with broad ramifications for other nation-states. This essay begins to explore some of these ramifications. In terms ofChinese sovereignty, Tibet is part of what China’s constitution refers to as “sacred territory” and as such is exclusively beholden to the Chinese state. To claim constitutionally that one’s sovereign territory is sacred, as in a space to be set apart precisely so as to be able to control it through a politicized inclusivity, is tantamount to the process of territorialization becoming a type of sacralization, a rendering of social and geographical space as inviolate. I argue that territorialization by the nation-state, in this case China, is in fact a form of sacralization bolstered by mythos and sovereign violence. Implicated in claims of sacrality is the language of human rights, and for the purposes of this paper, China’s constitutional claim of freedom of religion. To employ the term religion, however, is to unwittingly bind oneself to a European Protestant narrative and all the complications thereof. Both claims have deep implications for juridical constructions, the containment of populace, freedom of religion, and human rights in general.

In contrast with other subfields within religion-and-violence studies, the study of violence and new religious movements (NRMs) has tended to focus on a small set of incidents involving the mass deaths of members of controversial NRMs. Beginning with the suicide-murders of hundreds of members of the People’sTemple in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, various explanations of such incidents have been offered – some focusing on the psychological make-up of the leaders; others on the near approach of the new millennium. Scholars of violent new religions eventually settled on what might be called the ‘Standard Model’ of NRM violence, a model that takes into account internal factors, external factors and the dynamic polarization between these two sets of influences. Unfortunately, this model is not predictive. However, if the various factors within the standard model are reshuffled, several new factors added and the focus shifted to violent incidents involving group suicide, a modified model emergences that appears to be able to predict mass suicide in NRMs.