Introduction: On Sacred or Secular Grounds and How Would We Know?

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11 2001 had a grave impact on the way the conflict dynamics in world politics have been shaped, structured and interpreted since then. The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the US drone programs launched during the first decade of the 00’s in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia and the more recent interventions in Libya (2011), and Mali (2013) have all at some point been related to the concern of combatting international terrorism. To fight or prevent international terrorism still appears as a top-priority for the great powers of the West and questions about the role of religion in explaining the motivations and occurrences of terrorist acts still remain topical.

The shockwaves that went through the world in the wake of the 2001 assaults on US territory also influenced the way we as scholars began to look at the world. While black-and-white enemy images were inflated on the political stages portraying the perpetrators and their co-ideologists as nothing less than devilish, in academia the event also created a momentum for revisiting the conceptual schemes that we often use to make sense of the world and human behavior. Scholars of international relations were particularly affected by the event, since it strongly pushed religion into their eyesight – a category that had never made it into the mainstream of scholarly attention on par with the IR disciplines’ central concepts such as power, sovereignty, national interest etc. The scholarly attention was also drawn by the fact that in many European countries as well as in the US the new threat from religious extremists, Muslim fanatics and fundamentalists was debated fiercely and the role of religion or excessive religion became part of both domestic debates about homegrown terrorism and radicalization and the international discourse on global terrorism. Terms like fundamentalism and terrorism were applied in ways that presupposed that we knew what it was all about: they hated us because of their religion, or excessive religiosity that was not based on a separation of religion and politics (as opposed to the hegemonic portrayal of religion in the liberal world). ¹

The idea to put together this Forum on religion and violence was born out of an international conference convened by the Danish Institute for International Studies and the Center for Advanced Security Theory in Copenhagen 10 years after 9/11 2001. It brought together scholars from various disciplinary fields (anthropology, theology, psychology, political science) who discussed the methodological and conceptual challenges of dealing with religion and violence. While there was a widespread consensus across scholars working within the different disciplinary fields about the fact that religion does matter, the question of how exactly it matters and relates to violence remained controversial, across and within the various fields.

It appears that for the field of international relations and its scholars the debate is still quite novel. In spite of the fact that for years the social sciences have been in the midst of deconstructing the secularization thesis that had shunt aside religion as a scientific category for decades, the scientific revolt against the discrimination of religion as a strong factor that effects on human behavior was only slowly entering into the field of International Relations before 2001. A special issue of Millennium published in December 2000 was quite prescient in taking up the resurgence of religion in international politics as its central theme. The contributions called for taking religion seriously and for recognizing the religiosity that is very often embedded in secular claims of being neutral and non-doctrinal. As the editors wrote in their introduction “Should perhaps International Relations theory finally acknowledge its own religion?” ² . While the privatization of religion (encoded in the doctrine that “the ruler determines the religion of his realm”) has widely been recognized as the main principle that ended the religious civil wars in Europe, the special issue provokingly asked whether the interpretation of the privatization as a separation of religion and politics had become the “new sacred principle of the emerging Westphalian order”. ³

These sorts of questions are still lurking in the background of this Forum that continues an engagement with the re-emergence of religion on the scientific agenda. However it focuses more specifically on the relationship between religion on one side and violence, conflict and war on the other. Today, more than ten years after the events of 9/11 2001, the discipline of IR is still struggling with theoretical and methodological puzzles about how to study and conceptualize the religion-violence nexus. While the 2001 events led to a renewed engagement with religion, one of the predominant ways that religion has been dealt with, particularly in the US, still represents responsiveness to the questions that were born out of the urgent foreign policy demands of the West. ⁴ Though there are notable exceptions (such as the work of Cecelia Lynch, who is a contributor to this Forum), European contributions have often provided a counterweight to the ‘problem-solving agenda’ by problematizing essentialist understandings of religion, the sacred, the secular, and the post secular in ways that are important for clarifying the assumptions scholars make when they interpret religious movements, actors, doctrines, political theologies, political religions, and civil religions. ⁵ Arguably this does not mean that the critical approaches are unable to deal with ‘actual problems’ or contribute to answering contemporary policy questions about religion and violence.

The contributions made here fall within this ‘European turn’ in the study of religion in IR, and call for a wider and more fundamental debate that is critically aware of the concepts and assumptions that are often taken for given in the religion and IR debate. As the contributions in this Forum display, the conceptual and methodological debate is important because of its implications for conventional IR thinking on key issues such as the legitimacy of violence and war, the question of what decides human behavior and what leads to human conflict.

Since the 2000-issue of Millennium was published there have been several important contributions re-enforcing the argument that religion ought to be taken seriously within the discipline of IR. ⁶ Also the argument that even ideas that are popularly regarded as secular ideas can be religious in some sense of the word or religious ideas can be viewed as secular has been elaborated together with the IR discipline’s ‘genealogical inclination’ towards secularism. ⁷ What is however still lacking from the existing work on religion and IR is work that display how to methodologically and conceptually make sense of the impact that religion can have on an international relations phenomena, in this case violence. What are the premises that create the link between religion and violence, what are the underlying ontological assumptions, and what are the methodological limitations of different approaches? As it has forcefully been argued by theologian William Cavanaugh, rather than treating religion as something simply found “out there”, one of the critical tasks is to display the power practices involved in constructing certain acts and ideas as “religious” and other things as “secular” or “political.” ⁸

We have chosen to concentrate on the phenomena of violence, even though we acknowledge that the application and impact of religion is much broader. Religion can cultivate, inspire and facilitate peace as well as violence. However, the reason why we find this focus on the religion-violence nexus pertinent is that since 9/11 2001, many of the claims about the relationship between religion and violence were made in unsubstantiated recommendations from think thanks and policy circles - based on implicit assumptions about an intimate relationship between religiosity and violent behavior. These assumptions created tautological and linear links between religiosity and violence: the more religious, the more violence-prone; the more religion is mixed with politics, the more likely is it that the outcome will be violent. This sort of literature is still dominant and continues to inform policy decisions, which in turn reaffirms the grave need for more research on the linkage between religion and violence based on grounded conceptual and methodological reflections.

Instead of arguing why religion is significant for the field of IR, the ambition with this Forum is to pose the how-questions: How does or doesn’t religion impact on the occurrence of violence? How do religious ideas, beliefs, speech and culture impact on or motivate violent action? What is the link between mind and behavior and how do we in practice trace this link if the mind-body dualism makes sense at all? How do we in the West conceptualize religion in a way that is not biased towards western Protestantism as a set of ideas? How do we understand violence in a way that does not reduce its occurrence to a matter of religious fundamentalism?

Four different perspectives on this issue are taken in the contributions that are inspired by four different theoretical trends.

In the first contribution, Mona Kanwal Sheikh critically discusses and further develops the way religion has been conceptualized in securitization theory. The approach Sheikh engages with is based on the idea that there is a relationship between securitizing speech-acts and violent behavior. In the special issue of Millennium published in 2000, advocates of securitization theory launched a new sector of security—the religion sector — where faith was seen as the main referent object, i.e. that which is defended by the securitizing actor. Although Sheikh agrees that religion needs special analytical attention—and therefore a specific sector—she argues that the original conceptualization of religion by the Copenhagen School was too narrow and ethno-centric, relying heavily on Western theology or Christianity. Consequently, she proposes two alternative ways of addressing religion within a securitization framework. First, she suggests adopting a multidimensional concept of religion based on the typology defined by sociologist of religion Ninian Smart. Instead of a narrow focus on faith, she argues that empirical evidence shows that several possible referent objects could be defended in religious securitizations. Secondly, as doctrinal tensions are at the heart of many world conflicts today, she proposes to enlarge the religion sector by calling it a “doctrine sector”. In this sector the referent object is not only religion, but more broadly doctrines or “quasi-religions” that are understood as particular principles, values or ideas about ways of life, which are accepted as authoritative by a group of people and upheld by particular legendary myths. Depending on the analytical task, she suggests that each of these analytical options can be applied.

Cecelia Lynch extends the neo-Weberian framework ⁹ to study the religion-violence nexus. On one hand this approach challenges perspectives which uncritically assume that religion produces violence, while on the other hand it allows for the study of the critical relationship between religion and violence, where it occurs. She begins by providing a genealogy of work in IR and related fields that emphasizes the religion-violence nexus, either by reinforcing primordial understandings or partially questioning them. She then draws on Weber as well as MacIntyre and others to develop the neo-Weberian approach, which is precisely such an attempt to avoid essentializing by paying attention to how religious actors interpret religious doctrines in specific contexts. Hence, the neo-Weberian approach, she argues, seeks to “bridge the gap between doctrine, ethics and action in particular situations”. This implies that doctrine does not “determine” action or violence in any monocausal sense. Instead of presupposing that religious doctrine conditions action in any simple sense, Lynch suggests that we must “assess what religious guidelines suggest for particular situations, and then look more deeply into how religious actors interpret those guidelines – how they bridge the gap between religious rules and particular situations to decide how to act”. Applying the neo-Weberian framework, Lynch analyzes how early modern Christian thinkers grappled with the question of the legitimacy of using force against Amerindians in order to conquer, colonize and convert them. This case, she argues, continues to have resonance for both religious and secular constructions of violence against others today.

Manni Crone focuses on the concepts of radicalization that were deployed in the wake of the London bombings in 2005. “Radicalization” is considered as a process where the adoption of religious ideology will eventually lead to violence. According to Crone this conception of the religion-violence nexus tends to intellectualize violence by seeing it as an outcome of a cognitive process. Crone questions this conception of how religion and violence are related and, from a fieldwork experience, suggests that pathways to religious violence can also be considered as embodied practices of self-government. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “care of the self” and Marcel Mauss’ notion of “body techniques” she argues that today young men in Europe are seeking to transform themselves to embrace Muslim militancy by adopting specific “body techniques”. Hence, intellectual processes and embodied practices are co-constitutive. The “techniques of the body” are a kind of habitus that includes not only the physical body, but also its inclinations, habits, skills as well as the practical and theoretical reasoning involved in embodied practices. Furthermore, she suggests, this transformation of body techniques is currently made possible, not by intellectual technologies of the self such as the Koran or fatwas, but by aesthetic technologies like videos and images that materialize religious bodies, songs, speech, artifacts etc. These videos—that are considered as “aesthetic assemblages”—provide religious models that through identification, imagination and mimetic practice can enable Muslim militancy.

In the last contribution, Scott Thomas applies René Girard’s mimetic theory to deconstruct the religion-violence nexus. The way in which this nexus is constructed is, according to Thomas, itself a form of power in international relations. Following Girard, it is not as often presumed religion that is the condition of violence; rather political theologies and religious violence are both byproducts of something more fundamental, namely mimetic desire and rivalry. At the core of mimetic theory is the notion of mimetic desire. Our desires are not natural, but socially acquired through the imitation of the desire of the others. When this mimetic desire is oriented towards exclusive goods, which cannot be shared, mimetic desire will turn into mimetic rivalry and competition and eventually violence. This situation is Hobbes’ war of all against all. Hence, culture, religion and the sacred originate in society’s need to keep in check the original mimetic rivalry that leads to violence. This is done through the scapegoat mechanism. Societies keep mimetic rivalry in check not through a contract, but through the conscious – or more often, non-conscious convergence, on a victim or scapegoat so the Hobbesian dilemma of ‘all against all’ is resolved by ‘all against one,’ and peace and social stability are restored to society. In contrast to various essentialist or functionalist conceptions of the religion-violence nexus, which would somehow consider religious violence as the product of religious doctrine, mimetic theory sees violence as the product of mimetic desire and rivalry. In domestic society, violence can be channeled inwards towards an inner scapegoat, and in foreign policy it can be channeled outwards. Thomas uses mimetic theory to analyze two versions of the scapegoat mechanism: first in relation to Western foreign policy towards the Middle East, and secondly in relation to the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

The focus on theorization, conceptualization and methodology in probing the relationship between religion and violence is very much part of the fundamental question about the nature of human beings – what makes us act in a certain way, what forces or motivations influence our actions and decisions, how do our actions in turn affect our ideas and how are ideas and actions at all linked together? The focus on theory, conceptualization and methodology is also important because it can reveal patterns of conflict, particularly thought patterns that keep conflicts alive on ‘our own’ side: Expressed in the words of the 19th century American author Mark Twain who once wrote about human nature that “We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.” Hence taken together the contributions of the Forum is also a call to make our basic assumptions in the religion-violence debate more transparent – they can be read as a part of a self-critical project in which we can learn to be more aware of the underlying assumptions behind (our own) standpoints and behavior – not just those of who we consider to be our enemies. The reason why the uncovering of underlying assumptions is important is that they lead to different ways of understanding and interpreting the conflict patterns of the world, and ultimately also to different policy prescriptions and options.

If it is true that humans are the only religious animals on earth, the questions raised here are of central significance. But even if we were to agree that religion is less important in itself and more important as an ex post facto rationalization of our behavior, mimetic desire or human rivalry, we still owe to explain how we reach that conclusion, based on what conceptual and theoretical assumptions. The contributions found in this Forum are exactly an attempt to do that, and bringing more transparency into the religion-violence debate.