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1. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2014, Vol. 43(1) 308–327 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0305829814540856 mil.sagepub.com MILLENNIUMJournal of International Studies 1. René Girard, Battling to the End (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 103. Culture, Religion and Violence: René Girard’s Mimetic Theory Scott M. Thomas University of Bath, UK Abstract This article introduces René Girard’s mimetic theory to examine the relationship between culture, religion and violence. It challenges the way the problem of religion and violence is narrowly conceptualised as a problem of ‘religious violence’ (i.e. religious terrorism and civil war). When the problem of religion and violence is constructed in this way, purportedly to take religion seriously, it does so by not taking culture or politics seriously. It is a limited conception since religion as a concept is always socially, culturally and politically contested, negotiated and constructed. It is not a neutral descriptor of a reality in the world, which causes violence under certain conditions. Moreover, this limited conception of religion fits what critical theorists call a problem-solving approach to theory. It ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interests the problem of religion and violence is constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way the problem of religion and violence is constructed can be challenged as an example of the scapegoat mechanism in mimetic theory, and how it operates in the West as well as in the religion and violence in countries that are the object of Western foreign policy. This is demonstrated in two case studies: the invention of religious violence, and ethno-religious conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. Keywords critical theory, founding violence, imitation, mimesis, mimetic desire, scapegoat mechanism No man is a prophet in his own land because no land wants to hear the truth about its own violence. It will always try to hide it in order to have peace, but the best way to have peace is to make war. René Girard1 Corresponding author: Scott M. Thomas, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. Email: S.M.Thomas@bath.ac.uk 540856MIL0010.1177/0305829814540856Millennium: Journal of International StudiesThomas research-article2014 Forum: Religion and violence at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

2. Thomas 309 2. For a more recent edition see Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (OUP, Oxford, 1968). 3. Todd A. Gooch, ‘Das Heilige and German “Irrationalism” after the First World War’, in T.A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolph Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 132–59. 4. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Daniel Philpott, ‘Explaining the Political Ambivalence of Religion’, American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007): 506–23; Eva Bellin, ‘Faith in Politics: New Trends in the Study of Religion and Politics’, World Politics 60 (2008): 315–47. 5. Ming Dong Gu, ‘Is Mimetic Theory in Literature and Art Universal?’, Poetics Today 26, no. 3 (2005): 459–98. 6. Necati Polat, International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis (New York and London: Routledge, 2012). 7. Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 41, 41–134. Religious and political leaders with every new act of religious violence claim that religion had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with it. They claim all the main world religions, rightly understood, preach a message of peace and good will. Such horrible acts are the result of wicked or misguided religious fanatics, militants, terrorists, extrem- ists or fundamentalists who have misunderstood their religion, or they are the result of political opportunists who manipulate religion for political purposes. R. Scott Appleby’s concept ‘the ambivalence of the sacred’ contrasts the best aspects of religion with the way it can be associated with the most horrible violence. It is based on Rudolph Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy (1917),2 which describes the holy, the sacred, as ‘fascinating and terrifying’, as the essential, emotional, irrational core of religion. Otto’s concept provided a cultural and religious explanation for the German ‘irrationalism’ of the First World War.3 Appleby uses it to explain the irrationalism of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. The ambivalence of the sacred, or at least one of the ways Appleby’s concept has been interpreted, investigates what factors, under which conditions, religion contributes to peace or violence.4 Mimetic theory questions the way in which the problem of religion and violence is constructed. The theory takes its name from the Greek word mimesis that conveys the ideas of imitation and representation. It has its origins, at least in the West, in ancient Greek aes- thetic and literary theories.5 Scholars using mimetic theory have shown how pervasively mimesis is a part of the social world of competing stories, narratives, which determine the meaning of the dominant concepts, and interpretations of international relations.6 This article examines the influential approach to mimetic theory developed by René Girard, the former Andre B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilisation at Stanford University. Girard’s mimetic theory is important for the study of religion and violence in international relations because it problematises the concept of the ambivalence of the sacred. It shows the constitutive relationship between culture, religion and violence, although his contribution is also inseparable from a more inclusive imagination on culture, society and politics. It is important to recognise how Girard’s mimetic theory ‘fits in the Western tradition of mimesis, and, more importantly, how it diverges from this tradition’.7 Some concepts at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

3. 310 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 8. Girard was one of the organisers of the symposium ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. It brought together Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and ‘was significant for bringing these new philosophical currents into the American academic scene’. Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 2004), 95. 9. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1977), 31. in Girard’s mimetic theory – mimesis, mimetic desire, imitation, the scapegoat, and original murder or founding violence, the idea violence in society is regulated through violence – can be found in the history of the Western intellectual tradition. They can also be found in contemporary thinkers who have influenced the post-war world – structuralist (e.g. Claude Lévi-Strauss), post-structuralist (Derrida), psychoanalytical (Freud, Jacques Lacan) and modernist (Walter Benjamin).8 However, Girard’s mimetic theory uniquely links these mimetic concepts together as part of a general theory of culture, and, unlike other mimetic approaches, it is also ‘first and foremost a theory of religion’. It examines the religious – or sacred, more broadly – dimension of social relations that links violence to the origins of culture, religion and the sacred, and to the origins of legal and political institutions. Crucially, he argues that these concepts separately, in and of themselves, cannot account for the traces of founding violence, nor the way violence is transformed into peace and social order in the rituals, myths and literature of cultures around the world. Girard, rather than explain the ambivalence of the sacred, argues quite the contrary: ‘Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.’9 This is not recognised on an everyday basis. It is what mimetic theorists call veiled violence, and the argument of mimetic theory is concealed – the sacred and sacred violence underlie any society’s founding myths and rituals; peace, solidarity and social order are produced through violence. Therefore, Girard’s mimetic theory challenges the way the problem of religion and violence is narrowly conceptualised as a problem of religion – ‘religious violence’ (i.e. religious terrorism and civil war). There are two critical, intersecting, issues that emerge from mimetic theory when the problem of religion and violence is constructed in this way. The first is that the use of substantive definitions of religion (i.e. religion as a set of doctrines) turns religion into an abstract category. This offers too limited a conception of the problem of religion and violence. It purportedly takes religion seriously, but by not taking culture seriously; and, perhaps, by not even taking politics seriously, or at least not seriously enough. It is limited because religion is not a concept that can be abstract, universal, transhistorical and transcultural, nor can religion be apolitical (religious texts are always power texts). Substantive definitions ignore or consider unproblematic what mimetic theorists and social constructivists in theology, religious studies and international relations consider essential: religion is a concept that is always socially, culturally and politically contested, negotiated and constructed. It is not a neutral descriptor of a reality in the world, which causes violence under certain conditions. These issues are dealt with in the first sections of the article. They introduce Girard’s mimetic theory and explain its relation to the modern invention of religion and religious violence. The second issue, however, is also crucial and intersects with the first one. It is central to critical theory in international relations. This approach is indebted to the Frankfurt at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

4. Thomas 311 10. Robert W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium 10, no. 2 (1981): 126–55; Robert W. Cox, ‘The Point Is Not Just to Explain the World but to Change It’, in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, eds Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84–93. 11. Kirwan, Discovering Girard, 58–9. 12. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 193, 195, 223–41. 13. Ibid., 169. School and argues that a problem-solving approach to theory, which investigates the factors and conditions under which religion causes violence, can be contrasted with a critical approach, which recognises that how, by whom, and in whose interests the problem of religion and violence is constructed is itself a form of power in international relations, and also can be part of the problem of religion and violence in international relations.10 The way the problem of religion and violence is constructed can be challenged as an example of the scapegoat mechanism and how it operates in the West as well as in the religion and violence in countries that are the object of Western foreign policy. Therefore, how mimetic theory can be applied is examined in two case studies: one on Western foreign policy and the invention of religious violence, and one on ethno-religious conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory Girard uses the concept of mimesis since it includes the idea of mediated or borrowed desire (e.g. mimetic desire or acquisitive mimesis). He observed from his study of myths, rituals and literature that the basic way human beings learn is by mutual imitation. We learn what to desire through the desire of others. He does not mean simply that people copy a style or pattern in the actions, speech, appearance or mannerisms of others. Desire is not the same as biological needs or appetites (such as hunger, thirst or sex) that are ‘natural’, which can be identified with the specific objects that can satisfy them. It is a product of culture and is socially constructed. The triangular structure of desire expresses the key social relationships: human beings (the Self or Subject) learn what to desire (the Object of desire) through the imitation, often non-consciously, of others (the Mediator or Model of desire). Human beings imitate what they desire, admire, what they are attracted to, or even imitate what they are repelled from, what they resent, as if caught in a kind of social gravitational field. Jacques Lacan is often remembered for his maxim ‘desire is always the desire of the Other’, and on this point he influenced Girard more than Freud. He tried to use psychoanalytical theory to ground a theory of social forma- tion that did not rely on the Oedipal complex.11 However, Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan do not identify mimetic desire as a generative social mechanism operative in all societies.12 In Girard’s mimetic theory, mimetic rivalry and competition and not aggression is the main cause of violence. ‘By making one man’s desire into a replica of another man’s desire, it inevitably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence.’13 Mimetic desire is what is universal in the human condition, but it is not directed towards the desirability of specific objects. In mimetic theory, which human beings and which at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

5. 312 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 14. Kirwan, Discovering Girard, 19. 15. Paul Laurent and Gilles Paquet, ‘Intercultural Relations: A Myrdal–Tocqueville–Girard Interpretive Scheme’, International Political Science Review 12, no. 3 (1991): 171–83. 16. Nicholas Onuf, ‘Old Mistakes: Bourdieu, Derrida, and the “Force of the Law”’, International Political Sociology 3, no. 4 (2010): 315–18. objects are desired are not predetermined (this is how Girard’s conception differs from desire in Freud, Lacan and Walter Benjamin, and other thinkers). Girard’s mimetic theory has three important corollaries. The first is that mimetic desire is a part of the social dynamics of how identity is socially constructed. The notion of the rational autonomy of the individual, so much a part of liberal theory, is premised on what Girard calls ‘the illusion of spontaneous desire’, the myth that individuals freely choose the objects of their own desire (what he also calls ‘the Romantic lie’, the desiring self as autonomous and independent, when the self is really ‘unstable, constantly changing’).14 The second corollary is about the type of goods or objects mimetic desire is oriented towards. When desire is oriented towards non-exclusive goods, such as a village learning a new way to plant maize, then imitation is peaceful and productive. Non-exclusive goods are public goods or collective goods since everyone in society can benefit from them. When mimetic desire is oriented towards exclusive goods, which cannot be shared, whether they are intangible or non-material – glory, status, prestige, meaning or recognition (metaphysical desire) – or tangible goods like territory – the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or Kosovo (acquisitive desire), then the inevitable result of imitation is rivalry and violence. The third corollary deals with how equality, similarity and difference relate to mimetic rivalry and violence. Mimetic theory argues that the potential for rivalry and violence depends on the social distance between the self or the subject and the model or mediator of desire. The mediation is external if the distance between the self or the subject and the model is greater in time or space, and then there is little prospect of them coming into rivalry because of the social and cultural rules, norms or taboos between them. If the mediation is internal, the social distance (actual or virtual) between the self or the subject and the model is much less, and then there is the potential for greater mimetic rivalry and violence (the family, community or neighbourhood). This is particularly the case now politically, with the spread of equality and democracy, and technologically, with the internet, social networking and globalisation.15 Peace Is Violently Constructed: The Origins of Culture, Religion and the Sacred Girard examines the concept of founding violence in the European intellectual tradition, and in the myths and rituals of cultures around the world. For critical scholars, the concept raises a problem – the meaning of peace, justice and law, and the way legal and political institutions derived from them rest on violence.16 Benjamin points to state violence – the death penalty – as a part of the violent foundations of any legal order, at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

6. Thomas 313 17. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Walter Benjamin: Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books), 277–300. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in Derrida, Acts of Religion (London: Routledge, 2002), 242, 252. See Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Andrew J. McKenna, ‘The End of Violence: Girard and Derrida’, Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience 1 (2011): 112–26, available at: http://riviste.unimi. it/index.php/Lebenswelt/article/view/1589 (accessed 9 May 2014). 19. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 275–96. 20. Wolfgang Palaver, ‘Mimetic Theories of Religion and Violence’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, eds Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael Jerryson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 533–53. 21. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 226. especially in ancient legal systems.17 Derrida, in his commentary on Benjamin, states that the violence of ‘the founding origin’ is ‘buried, dissimulated, repressed’, going back to archaic societies. This is why – following Pascal and Montaigne – he calls this the mystical force or foundation of law.18 The role of founding violence is central to the political implications of Girard’s mimetic theory. However, he uniquely links the scapegoat mechanism to founding violence, and to the violent origins of political power (sacred kingship), legal institutions (capital punishment, which concerned Benjamin) and international conflict (friend/ enemy distinctions).19 This section concentrates on the violent origins of the sacred and the scapegoat mechanism because this directly relates to the concept of religious violence. Girard is indebted to Durkheim, and central to his mimetic theory is a social conception of religion. Girard rejects the view of scholars with a modern conception of religion as a set of ideas, ideology or a search for meaning, which ignores the role of ritual and sacrifice in any society’s social, cultural and political institutions. In Girard’s mimetic theory, culture, religion, the sacred originate in the need for societies to keep in check the mimetic rivalry that leads to violence. This is the war of all against all, the crisis of political order Hobbes described as man’s natural condition. Culture in mimetic theory stems from disorder (rather than order, as is often assumed), i.e. the actual or potential violence that can exist in society when mimetic desire gets out of hand. Societies keep this rivalry in check, and establish and maintain social order, by finding a victim, a scapegoat, for the mimetic cycle of reciprocal violence that threatens social collapse. Converging on a victim brings to the society peace, unanimity and relief from violence (the Hobbesian ‘all against all’ is resolved by ‘all against one’).20 In archaic cultures before the rise of legal institutions the purpose of religion is found in the rituals of sacrifice – literally, this is what ‘sacrifice’ means – sacri-fice – ‘making sacred, producing the sacred’.21 Religious sacrifice – sacred violence – in the first instance is a founding murder, initially carried out against a real scapegoat by the community in a state of ecstasy and blind fury; in the second instance, it is ritual violence, a controlled, restaging of the founding violence. However, the scapegoat should display some characteristics similar to the actual victim, or else it would not be acceptable as a at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

7. 314 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 22. René Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning (New York, Ottawa, Leominster: Orbis/Novalis/ Gracewing, 2001), 70. 23. Girard acknowledges his debt to Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ that examines his notion of the pharmakon, which can mean ‘remedy’ or ‘poison’, for the development of his concept of the scapegoat mechanism. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 257, 263, 265, 295–8. 24. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 221. 25. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102–5. sacrificial substitute (this point is important in the case study of the Balkans to help explain the narcissism of small differences in ethnic conflict). The mimesis that created the violent social crisis also helps resolve it. The scapegoat has negative and positive elements mimetic theorists call double transference. The victim expelled as a scapegoat is first negatively reviled as evil, the one responsible for the crisis, and then is also deified, sacralised, since what is also positively attributed to the scapegoat is the sudden peace and reconciliation in the community. This is the core of archaic religion and is why Girard exclaims that ‘the peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.’22 The double transference of the scapegoat mechanism is evident in the usage of the Latin root sacer, which can be construed as ‘the holy’ or ‘the cursed’, ‘remedy’ or ‘poison’, and analogous words are found in other languages.23 The origin of religion, double transference and the scapegoat mechanism explain Otto’s idea of the holy and Appleby’s concept of the ambivalence of the sacred. All the basic elements of religion – myths, rituals and taboos – are rooted in founding violence. This is why Girard states: ‘There is no society without religion because without religion a society cannot exist.’24 In any society, violence and the sacred are central to the foundations of culture, religion and solidarity – for without some concept of the sacred, without something being made sacred – a flag, the nation, the state, a race, an ethnic group, a class, a political party, an idea (socialism, capitalism, Marxism), an institution, a constitution, an individual or, indeed, the living God, without something people are willing to make sacred – to sacrifice for or be willing to sacrifice others for – a society cannot exist; it would tear itself to pieces. Violence is channelled in domestic society (inwards on a common scapegoat) and in foreign policy (outwards on a common enemy). Unfortunately, globalisation enables both forms of scapegoating violence to intersect and reinforce each other. Mimetic Theory and the Invention of Religious Violence Mimetic theory offers a way to critically evaluate the invention of ‘religious violence’ as a concept in international relations. When this concept is used to clearly distinguish religious from secular violence, it is based on a substantive rather than a functional definition of religion. Substantive definitions are exclusivist, based on the content of the religion – specific doctrines and practices concerning gods, the sacred, while functional definitions have an expansive or inclusive idea of what religion is.25 Functional definitions focus on what religions do in society – they create awe, division, solidarity, at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

8. Thomas 315 26. Ibid., 105–18. 27. Girard distinguishes in his later work between the ‘violent sacred’, as a result of the scapegoat mechanism, and ‘the holy’ since for him ‘violence belongs to a form of the corrupt sacred’ and the holy is rooted ultimately in the non-violent being of God. René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture (New York: Continuum, 2007), 218; Girard, Battling to the End, 217. 28. Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: Norton, 2011), 22–4. 29. Ibid., 20–2. 30. Mona Kanwal Sheikh, ‘How Does Religion Matter?’, Review of International Studies 38, no. 2 (2012): 365–92. 31. Duffy Toft et al., God’s Century, 21–3. 32. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000); Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California, 2008). 33. Duffy Toft et al., God’s Century, 121–46; Bruce Hoffman, ‘Holy Terror: The Implications of Terrorism Motivated by a Religious Imperative’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 18, no. 4 (1995): 271–80; Assaf Moghadam, ‘Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 8 (2006): 707–29. meaning or a sense of what is of absolute or of ultimate concern.26 However, at the same time, mimetic theory cannot be reduced to a functional approach.27 Substantive definitions, in contrast to functional ones, are easier to use for scholars in international relations, allowing them to deal with religion in a straightforward manner. In what circumstances and under which conditions does religion matter? Religion is about doctrines, and ‘religious actors’ are those that identify with one of the world religions.28 What is rejected is a functional, expansive definition of religion, i.e. the idea that a variety of ideologies – like Marxism, capitalism, liberalism or nationalism – can be religions, even though they may share some of religion’s characteristics. Accordingly, nationalism, and virulent forms of nationalism like Hindu nationalism, are excluded as a type of religion.29 It is argued when the category of religion is expanded to include almost any ideology or set of practices that can function as a religion, the concept should be replaced by other categories.30 So ‘religion is something distinct, even if it sometimes shares characteristics with other forms of belief and belonging’.31 Substantive definitions of religion are necessary to establish the essentialist characteristics of religion – it is divisive, absolutist and non-rational to clearly distinguish between secular and religious violence. It is also argued that political theology (e.g. ideas like cosmic war, just war, crusade, martyrdom) reinforces this distinction since it also legitimates sacrificial violence.32 Security specialists use these distinctions to invent a new category, ‘religious terrorist groups’, and compile statistics on them, concluding they are more deadly, inflexible and irrational, and so less prone to peace, negotiations and compromise.33 However, for mimetic theorists this is too limited a conception of the problem of religion and violence. Designating some violence as religious may seem like a way of taking at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

9. 316 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 34. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 144; Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 32–3. 35. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘The Politics of Place and Origin’, in F. Kratochwil, The Puzzles of Politics: Inquiries into the Genesis and Transformation of International Relations (London: Routledge, 2011), 241–61. 36. Josip Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (London: Berg, 1996). 37. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People: Myths of the State – Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 38. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 32. religion seriously, but it does so mainly by not taking culture or politics seriously. This is the case for three main reasons. Firstly, from a mimetic perspective, the use of substantive definitions or political theology to construct a distinct category of religious violence misunderstands how violence is related to culture and the sacred. This is why it is mis- placed to isolate religion from other concepts – culture, ethnicity or nationalism. Violent doctrines do not cause mimetic rivalry or violence. Violence is not originary in mimetic theory, i.e. it is the other way around. Violent political theologies and religious violence are by-products of mimetic desire and rivalry. ‘In the traditional view [i.e. the view of the social sciences] the object comes first, followed by human desires that converge inde- pendently on the object. Last of all comes violence, a fortuitous consequence of the convergence.’ However, from a mimetic perspective, ‘we must invert the usual order of things in order to appreciate the import of tragic rivalry’.34 Secondly, constructing substantive, essentialist criteria, which separate culture, religion and nationalism, ignores how the politics of origin, place, identity and meaning function in modern culture and politics. The modern preoccupation with autonomy, meaning and authenticity are intelligible as roots are being lost through modernisation and globalisation. Calls for a return to roots through nationalism, religious fundamentalism or a religious resurgence (or indeed all of these together) are distinctively modern projects of retrieval and construction, and are attempts to grapple with the central problems of modernity – identity, authenticity and meaning.35 Therefore, the idea that nationalism only shares some of the essentialist characteristics of religion ignores how it functions in the culture of modern societies. It should be recognised for what it is – ‘the god of modernity’, going back to Hobbes and other state- building publicists.36 Indeed, if nationalism can be described as a type of ontology, i.e. a doctrine about the essence of reality, then it surely functions with the same kind of non- rational, transcendental sense of awe, passion and devotion narrowly attributed to substantive definitions of religion.37 There is no ‘warrant for supposing that the commitment of a U.S. marine – semper fidelis – is any less “intense” than that of a Hamas militant, as if such a thing could be measured’.38 Thirdly, from a mimetic perspective, a modern, Western conception of religion is used to construct the concept of religious violence. It reflects Otto’s idea of the holy to describe the inward impulse, emotion, underlying the universality of religious experience. Religion is defined as a separate category of human experience, and one that is also expressed transculturally and transhistorically in the main world religions. at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

10. Thomas 317 39. Timothy Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (London: Continuum, 2011); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 40. Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. 41. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 57–102, 85–101; Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 42. Talal Asad, The Genealogy of Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 43. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 82; Philpott, Shah and Duffy Toft miss the point of Cavanaugh’s criticism. Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Response to William Cavanaugh’, Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, no. 3 (2012): 403–7. The modern concept of religion is widely challenged in a variety of disciplines.39 Talal Asad’s criticisms, especially regarding Clifford Geertz, are particularly influential since his views reflect the prevalent view of religion as a cultural system separate from power, politics and violence.40 Asad argues there can be no universal concept of religion. It is a construction of European modernity, and its constituent elements go back to the Renaissance and Reformation. Moreover, the state-building elites (e.g. Bodin, Hobbes and Locke) used the polemic of the wars of religion to legitimate state power and transfer the people’s loyalty to new states and away from the clergy, the Church and the religious community. The modern state, as these publicists argued, as part of the political mythology of liberalism, allegedly had to save us from the hatred, bigotry and wars of religion. Later on, the modern concept of religion influenced European imperialism. It was exported to deny indigenous peoples their religion, and then to help rule them.41 This is why it is not possible – as Geertz insists – to discover the primacy of meaning through rituals, symbols and culture without considering power, the authoritative practices, disciplines and discourses, and the social processes through which meaning is constructed, and which induce religious actions, motivations and dispositions.42 What counts as religious, secular or political in any given context is not only socially constructed; it is a function of different configurations of power surrounding the construction of the categories – the religious, the secular and the political – and the boundaries between them. The deeper problem is that essentialist readings of religion … ignore or distort changes in how the world is arranged. Major shifts in terms and practices are accompanied by shifts in the way that authority and power are distributed, and transhistorical conceptions of religion tend to obscure rather than illuminate these shifts … The deeper problem is that transhistorical accounts of religion are themselves implicated in shifts in the way authority and power are distributed, while claiming to be purely descriptive.43 Therefore, the use of substantive definitions, essentialist characteristics, to distinguish between secular and religious actors and secular and religious violence from a critical theory perspective is a limited and apolitical approach to the study of politics and religion. It obscures what should be investigated – the role of power and politics in how, and at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

11. 318 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 44. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 12. 45. Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 46. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 208. 47. Ibid., 194–208; Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (London: Continuum, 2002); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). in whose interests, the categories of religion, politics and the secular are used and constructed. Mimetic theory has been used in this section to show that a substantive definition of religion and the concept of religious violence offer too limited a conception of culture, religion and violence. A functional definition makes it easier to probe deeper into cultural politics – the politics of how the sacred and violence function in any society. Mimetic theory reconfigures the research problem of religion and violence. It investigates what is made sacred, and by whom, and what is sacrificed in any society as a part of the cultural dynamics that produce social order through the scapegoat mechanism. The Invention of Religious Violence, the Scapegoat Mechanism and Western Foreign Policy Cavanaugh argues that the myth of religious violence ‘has helped to reinforce patriotic adherence to the nation-state as that which saves us from our other, more divisive, identi- ties’.44 The scapegoat mechanism operates in this way. It is the often conscious, but usually non-conscious, convergence on a victim, some ‘Other’ abroad to produce at home unanimity or community.45 It is important to emphasise this or else the scapegoat mechanism is misunderstood. Theories of religion or religious violence are ‘not a deliberate piece of propaganda meant to justify acts of war’. Most theorists are deeply concerned about violence. ‘Nevertheless, insofar as the myth of religious violence is used to divide acts of violence into those that are potentially legitimate and those that are always ille- gitimate, the myth can be used to divert moral scrutiny away from certain acts of violence.’46 Cavanaugh’s concept of the myth of religious violence is an attempt to expose the scapegoat mechanism. He does this in relation to US foreign policy towards the Islamic world. A type of Orientalist, or post-Orientalist, discourse, ‘the West and the Rest’, inter- prets the West as modern, rational and secular and the Islamic world as fanatical, religious and non-rational.47 The invention of religious violence, with the use of essentialist religious characteristics, can be misleading regarding the assumptions about the motives, causes and behaviour of religious, political or nationalist movements (categories that can over- lap considerably). ‘In Israel’, for example, it is argued, ‘a number of religious actors are responsible for Islamic terrorism.’ Hamas is singled out as an obvious example at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

12. Thomas 319 48. Duffy Toft et al., God’s Century, 141–2. 49. Ibid., 26–31. 50. Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (London: Hurst, 2007); Jeroen Gunning and Richard Jackson, ‘What’s So “Religious” about “Religious Terrorism?”’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 4, no. 3 (2011): 369–88. 51. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 52. CynthiaLynch,‘ANeo-WeberianApproachtoReligioninInternationalPolitics’,International Theory 1, no. 3 (2009): 381–408. of a religious actor or Islamic terrorist group. Its violent political theology supplies its motives and goals and is allegedly the cause of its inflexibility, radicalism and terrorism.48 Hamas is an interesting case since even it does not easily fit the criteria used to determine religious violence. Its leaders are predominantly ‘secular’ professionals, its ideology is heavily influenced by nationalism, its targets are not typically religious, and its rationality, its operational logic, resembles that of many ‘secular’ groups, even though its leaders derive their motives and authority partly from religion. What it describes as the ‘liberation of Palestine’ is a secular goal, even though religion is used to motivate and legitimate its political action. However, this goal cannot be meaning- fully distinguished from other secular agendas of national liberation. Even if the goal, the motive, for creating an ‘Islamic state’ seems explicitly religious, like the concept of ‘fundamentalism’, such goals emerge in the same way that nationalism and fundamentalism are modern projects, ways of grappling with modernity. In the Arab world this takes the form of a political and modern interpretation of religion, moulded by modern ‘secular’ political dynamics – the failure of Arab nationalism, which cannot be separated from European imperialism or Western foreign policy in the Middle East. Moreover, the Hamas example also brings out a number of problems when political theology is defined, using a substantive definition of religion, as ‘the ideas that a religious group holds regarding legitimate political authority’,49 or when it includes the violent ideas that Juergensmeyer argues lead to sacrificial violence (e.g. cosmic war). Firstly, the definition assumes that distinct concepts can be identified – the religious, the secular, the political – to clearly distinguish them from secular political movements. Hamas’s political theology is not easily classified as ‘religious’ since reason, revelation and popu- lar legitimacy also have a role – as they did in Locke, Hobbes, Hegel and other early modern Western philosophers.50 Secondly, the use of the category political theology to clearly distinguish religious movements from secular ones also ignores the politics surrounding the construction of these categories, and the boundaries between them. It ignores the ways that (secular) political philosophy – the construction of the sacred, the secular and secularism – is itself a type of political theology.51 Thirdly, the emphasis on ideas and doctrines is too static an interpretation of political theology or religious traditions. It ignores how debates over doctrine, practice, faithful- ness and what it means to live out the moral life within a tradition cannot be separated from the way religion is actually lived in the cultural, political context of the times.52 Any at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

13. 320 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 53. Islamism, Violence, and Reform in Algeria, Middle East Report No. 29 (International Crisis Group, 30 June 2004). 54. Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Saints, Mahdis, and Arms: Religion and Resistance in Nineteenth Century North Africa’, in Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, eds Edmund Burke III and Ira M. Lapidus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 60–80. 55. Tomer Persico, ‘Settler Politics as God’s Playing Field’, Haaretz (Israel), 6 April 2013. 56. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 208–25. 57. Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and J. de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Carsten B. Lausten and Ole Waever, ‘In Defense of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects for Securitization’, Millennium 29, no. 3 (2000): 705–39. political theology, even a violent one, is a part of that religious community’s reflexive relationship to the world. Algeria’s Islamist parties moved away from violence.53 The way the US, Europe or the West have interfered with politics, culture and religion in the Arab world cannot be ignored, a world that was already engaging with European liberal ideas – until the British and French conquest of the ummah, the Islamic community in Egypt and North Africa.54 The cause of Hamas’s militancy, its political theology – a radical or militant Sunni Islam – and its desire to create an Islamic state cannot be isolated from politics, culture and history. Its political theology relates to the mimetic rivalry of inter-Palestinian politics, Israeli policy and Western policy towards the Arabs and Palestinians. The Hamas example shows, with what is thought to be a clear case study of religious terrorism, political theology, apart from culture, politics, history and spirituality, does not offer a helpful way to classify and interpret such movements, nor what it means regarding the future of violence, negotiations or political outcomes. Therefore, underlying the concept of religious violence appears to be the scapegoat mechanism. A clear political purpose is served when religious violence is constructed as a category – to unite the West and delegitimise certain types of political actors, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic groups, and seemingly legitimate other ones (e.g. the violent political theology of Israeli settler movements).55 The idea that our ‘good’ secular violence is sometimes needed to confront their ‘bad’ religious violence, what Cavanaugh calls the ‘liberal war of liberation’ – the ideas of the secular commentators Roger Kimball, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman – is part of how the ambiguities of violence and the scapegoat mechanism promote unanimity and community.56 Moreover, the invention of religious violence contributes to the way religion in the West has become what the Copenhagen School calls ‘securitised’ in foreign policy. Security threats do not simply exist; they are social facts, intersubjective constructions, which perceive a new kind of problem that needs to be handled in extraordinary legal and political ways.57 This legitimates controversial practices in counter-terrorism. If security threats can be interpreted as intersubjective constructions, then from a mimetic perspective this is another reason why a concept of religion is important that emphasises how culture, religion and the sacred relate to violence. It probes how the scapegoat mechanism operates in foreign policy and international security. at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

14. Thomas 321 58. Elez Bibeeraj, ‘Kosovo: The Balkan Powder Keg’, in Ethnic and Religious Conflicts, ed. Peter Janke (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994), 1–28; Dusko Sekulic, ‘The Creation and Dissolution of the Multinational State: The Case of Yugoslavia’, Nations and Nationalism 3, no. 2 (1997): 165–79. 59. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, 67–8; Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 48–9. 60. Christian J. Tams, ‘The Use of Force against Terrorists’, European Journal of International Law 20, no. 2 (2009): 359–97. 61. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995); Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 14, 216, 247, 251. Ethnic Conflict and the Scapegoat Mechanism Mimetic theory’s approach to culture, the sacred and violence can be applied to the Balkan Wars. Appleby does not explain the paradox of why religion strongly featured in the Balkan wars when under Tito Yugoslavia was secularised, most Bosnian Muslims were secularised, and there were few devout, practising Catholic or Orthodox leaders. Many commentators dismiss the role of religion, referring to ethnic conflict, and attrib- ute the causes of war to other political, economic or cultural factors.58 Appleby tries to bring religion back in. The violent intensity, the hatred and irrationality, he argues, going back to Otto’s concept of the holy, are evidence of a religious cause of the break-up of Yugoslavia.59 However, mimetic theory offers another way to interpret this paradox – how religious violence takes place in a secular society. The violence of ordinary society is veiled violence, i.e. veiled by those social barriers – ethics, norms, taboos or other institutions of culture, religion – that provide it with an aura of legitimacy. Max Weber recognised this as the legal, official and authoritative ‘good violence’ of the state (which is why political scientists refer to it as the use of force).60 Mimetic theorists call unveiled violence the specific acts and eruptions of violence which disturb what for many in the West is normal life. However, from a mimetic perspective, the methodological emphasis on the disconti- nuities caused by such violent eruptions misses the continuities, the reciprocities in society that are a part of the mimetic escalation of violence. Unveiled violence is violence that has been shorn of its cultural, religious or political boundaries and legitima- tions. It is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the – allegedly – good violence of the state and the bad violence of those who oppose it. Unveiled violence is also apocalyptic violence since it reveals the violence that was hidden, as the last section indicated, as part of the way social order is created and maintained by the scapegoat mechanism.61 For mimetic theorists the violence of the scapegoat mechanism becomes more appar- ent – unveiled – at times of a sacrificial crisis in society. This is a cultural concept and is what political scientists identify as the unveiled, conscious (rather than non-conscious) political scapegoating in many civil wars. Political scientists, for example, have tried to explain the scapegoat mechanism – in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka or Rwanda – as a conscious plot of crafty, cynical leaders who stir up ethnic, religious or nationalist passions and manipulate the masses to conceal their nefarious purposes. at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

15. 322 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 62. Lars-Erik Cederman, ‘Nationalism and Ethnic Identity’, in Handbook of International Relations, eds Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth A. Simmons (London: Sage, 2002), 420. 63. Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milosevic, 4th edition (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002), 263. 64. Ibid., 265. 65. Ibid., 375–90. Scholars even use the term ‘ethnic scapegoating’ to characterise this violence and are puzzled that it should produce community. It has been argued, for example, that, ‘even in the most extreme cases, there is perversely a “constructive” aspect to violence’, which is that the violence contributes to community building in Serbia, Croatia and Rwanda, which ‘can be exploited by ruthless leaders’.62 However, according to mimetic theory, scapegoating violence is not perverse at all. The scapegoat mechanism always operates this way, but usually non-consciously, to produce community. In political science this is more a parody than a genuine mimetic recognition of the scapegoat mechanism as a non- conscious generative principle at work in politics, culture and society that is unveiled by apocalyptic violence. It has been pointed out regarding the dissolution of Yugoslavia: ‘Culture most transpar- ently figured in this war as an arena in which political ambitions have been projected.’63 This is what unveiled, apocalyptic, violence does. It shows how culture, religion and the sacred relate to violence since what is finally revealed is how the scapegoat mechanism operates in those societies. ‘Culture is one of the mediums’, it is argued, ‘in which politics may manifest itself’, as if this is unusual. Culture ‘is often (especially in times of social stress) permeated with political meanings, influences, and symbols’.64 In fact, this is always the case. The reality of these relationships – culture, religion, the sacred the political – is only clearly revealed at times of unveiled or apocalyptic violence. Violence in this kind of world is finally unveiled, the boundaries are blurred and contested between force and violence, piety and politics, the sacred and the secular. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the police, thugs, rebels, comrades, warlords, criminals and neighbourhood gangs, and between piety, politics and social, religious or political action. In this kind of world religious zealots like the Taliban engage the drug trade or destroy Buddhist shrines, Tuareg rebels in Mali destroy Sufi shrines, warlords have seats in the Serbian parliament, and the US supports evangelical, paramilitary forces in Central America (i.e. during the 1980s). Unveiled violence is at the heart of the confusion between such groups that seek violent leverage through intersecting forms of violence – civil wars, terrorism, holy wars, guerrilla warfare or wars of national liberation. It is for this reason, in addition to the criticisms already made, that the ambiguities of mimetic violence make it difficult to distinguish so clearly between secular and religious violence. Ethnic or religious scapegoating works so well to promote ethnic conflict because it is symptomatic of the wider sacrificial crisis in society. A sacrificial crisis describes the cultural foundations of the political problems of weak, failed or collapsed states. The primary characteristic of these states is political or Hobbesian – it is when a state lacks, or has lost, as in the case of Yugoslavia, its moral, political, legitimacy, with sensible borders and effective political institutions.65 at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

16. Thomas 323 66. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘“Balkan Mentality”: History, Legend, Imagination’, Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 2 (1996): 163–91. 67. M. Velikonja, ‘In Hoc Vinces: Religious Symbolism in the Balkan Wars, 1991–1995’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17, no. 1 (2003): 25–40. 68. Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). However, in mimetic theory the Hobbesian or political crisis of authority, legitimacy and governance – political awe – is only symptomatic of a society’s underlying cultural and religious crisis. Wars and friend/enemy relations, often considered a part of the political nature of human communities, in mimetic theory are cultural products and exten- sions of the scapegoat mechanism.According to the triangular structure of desire, internal mediation takes place when a subject and a model are part of the same social space and can enter into dangerous rivalry with each other. There is an erosion, or decline, in sacred awe (the state as a mortal god, as Hobbes said); the social barriers are eroded; the rituals, mores, taboos that kept in check the violence of society, and institutions like the police, army and judiciary which would normally limit or prevent mimetic rivalry, are corrupted, broken or are still being formed in democratic transitions. The first characteristic of a sacrificial crisis is a decay or erosion of sacrificial rites or practices, or the sacrificial system, and so society’s traditional order dissolves into violence. Mimetic theory’s more functional definition of religion is about what is made sacred in a society, even a secular society. The political crisis observed by political scientists is about how people respond, and the cultural or religious crisis is about why they respond the way they do – by seeking out scapegoats – and not in any other way. Many scholars have pointed to the paradox of religion in the ethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Rwanda and elsewhere to the seeming cynicism, shallow- ness and insincerity that appears to accompany appeals to religion in ethnic conflict. A substantive definition of religion is used when it is argued differences over religious doctrines hardly seem to be the source of ethnic conflict. People seem to be defending their families, communities, and not religious doctrines. However, this paradox is exactly what is to be expected with the erosion of the sacrificial system – what a society makes sacred. A shared ‘Balkan mentality’, at least among the Orthodox Christians, existed in Balkan society during the 18th century. This was turned into a perverse mythology by the appeal to Orthodoxy as a common symbolic banner in the 19th century. Its inner unity was subverted and its soul perverted by nationalism.66 The members of society may no longer think of themselves as performing religious rituals. They are only participating in rational historical events, and yet the sacred function of their rituals still consumes a lot of victims. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks (i.e. Bosnian Muslims) used religious symbols as a part of their political and nationalist mobilisation.67 The people singled out as victims were most often targeted – sacrificed in mimetic terms – on the basis of their religious identity. Religious symbols, rituals and institutions were used by members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as by secular nationalists, to promote an ideology of hatred, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Religious ceremonies often marked the Serb’s purification of a town with a Muslim population.68 Thus, the terms ethnic at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

17. 324 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 69. Natalie Z. Davis, ‘The Rites of Sacrifice’, in N.Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 152–87. 70. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 224–35. 71. Philip S. Gorski and Gülay Türkmen-Dervisoglu, ‘Religion, Nationalism, and Violence: An Integrated Approach’, Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 193–210. 72. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 48. 73. Wolfgang Benedek, Christopher Daase, Vojin Dimitrijevic and Petrus van Duyne, eds, Transnational Terrorism, Organized Crime and Peace-Building: Human Security in the Western Balkans (London: Palgrave, 2010). 74. Vern Neufeld Redekop, ‘Reconciling Nuers and Dinkas: A Girardian Approach to Conflict Resolution’, Religion 37 (2007): 64–84. 75. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, 78–9. conflict and ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars were euphemisms for ‘rites of sacrifice’, not unlike those Natalie Z. Davis described – killings, burning and drowning – during the French Wars of Religion.69 The second characteristic of a sacrificial crisis is the breakdown or collapse in civic and moral order, the basic structures of communal life, and the disintegration of moral and psychological coherence. Tim Judah constantly used words which describe Girard’s concept of the spreading contagion of violence – terror, reign of terror, insanity, madness, collective insanity and ‘the increasingly hate-filled rhetoric [that] was encouraging a climate of fear and violence which was taking on a life of its own’ – to describe the war in Croatia and Bosnia in 1992.70 Rational choice accounts of ethnic conflict hardly acknowledge this intensity of hatred and violence.71 What takes place in this aspect of a sacrificial crisis are attacks on social groups and individuals, but the blows really fall on social and political institutions.72 Physical violence, acts of reprisal, the cycle of vengeance – all imitative acts of violence – set off in mimetic terms a contagion of violence, a chain reaction of reciprocal violence that is characterised in competing and confusing ways – as a riot, an uprising, a rebellion, an insurrection, a civil war, revolution or simply anarchy. Lawlessness is another characteristic, which took place during the war in Bosnia, where criminal gangs or individuals looked for loot or revenge, or angry refugees looked for housing. It is not surprising that, as part of the contagion of violence, transnational crime, warlords, drug lords and criminal gangs have been identified as a crucial aspect of ethnic conflict and the collapse of the civic and moral order.73 A third characteristic of a sacrificial crisis is that it is a crisis of distinctions. One of the puzzling aspects of ethnic conflicts – in the Balkans, Rwanda or Northern Ireland – is how very much alike (from the outsiders’ viewpoint) the people killing each other actually can be in culture, ethnicity or language. Brothers and neighbours, people who lived cheek by jowl for years or centuries, are transformed into enemies.74 Appleby briefly uses the concept of mimetic rivalry between Serbs and Croats to explain the break-up of Yugoslavia. He calls them ‘twinned tribes mutually scornful and imitative of each other’ to explain their mimetic desire for the same objects – territory, language and education – as part of the rise of identity and ethnic chauvinism.75 at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

18. Thomas 325 76. Palaver, Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 92, 159, 176, 206. 77. Girard, Things Hidden, 38–9, 144–9, 158–61. 78. Frederick Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 1969). 79. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1999); Anton Blok, Honor and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 80. Beverly Crawford, ‘Explaining Cultural Conflict in Ex-Yugoslavia: Institutional Weakness, Economic Crisis, and Identity Politics’, in The Myth of ‘Ethnic Conflict’: Politics, Economics, and ‘Cultural’ Violence, eds Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998), 197–260; Ornit Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). However, he omits other concepts that complete a mimetic theory of violence. Culture in mimetic theory is a unitary complex of distinctions rooted in a non-conscious or concealed scapegoat mechanism. Girard sees the universal antagonism of doubles – a common type or pattern in the myths, history and cultures, Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel or the ‘twin tribes’ of Serbs and Croats.76 Appleby does not deploy this concept of mimetic theory to interpret the Yugoslav conflict. In mimetic theory it is the mythological killing of a brother, an enemy twin, which again estab- lishes the reappearance of difference that discourages mimetic rivalry and collective violence. This is what allows the founding of a cultural order. It is not the existence of differences in some primordial sense – ancient hatreds, Balkan ghosts (Bosnia- Herzegovina shows the coexistence of different communities). It is uncertainty, the modern uncertainty, surrounding the collapse of differences, or the threat of the collapse, that leads to the intensity of the sacrificial crisis, mimetic rivalry and violence.77 In mimetic theory the antagonism of doubles relates to nationalism, fundamentalism and religious resurgence as ways of responding to the problems of modernity – identity, authenticity and meaning – which are problems that relate to the collapse of difference in society. The scapegoat mechanism is the reason for this uncertainty. In mimetic theory the surrogate victim displays a certain resemblance to the actual victim – Serbs or Croats, Hutu or Tutsi – or else it would not be an acceptable sacrifice. A nationalist can take what are considered to be (by the outsider) the neutral, minor, facts about people – language, religion, culture and history – and construct a narrative in which they are transformed into major differences.78 What was irrelevant in the past, perhaps for generations, is now ‘remembered’ as the basis for the mimetic rivalry that can lead to collective violence. From a mimetic perspective, this is why the narcissism of minor differences is so effective, and it is what mimetic theory would expect as one of the indicators of a sacrificial crisis in society.79 Political scientists point to the important role of political leaders and political institutions in upsetting this certainty. Rulers and elites – political entrepreneurs – now fortify the new boundaries, empty the middle ground and increase the uncertainty between friends and neighbours who are funda- mentally the same.80 at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

19. 326 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1) 81. René Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 144. 82. Marysia Zalewski, ‘“All These Theories Yet the Bodies Keep Piling Up”: Theory, Theorists, Theorizing’, in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 340–53. Limits and Contribution Social scientists may be uneasy with the literary allusions in mimetic theory. Girard developed mimetic concepts by identifying the regularities, common patterns, in the myths, rituals and literature of cultures around the world. He says the main question to ask is: ‘Why are there myths and stories that seem so similar? Why do all these cultures carry similar features and tell of an original murder? Like all scientists, I am in search of the common factor, the pattern, rather than the difference.’81 The construction of the problem of religion and violence using substantive definitions of religion, the concepts of religious violence and the ambivalence of the sacred, are reconfigured in mimetic theory. It is not concerned with discovering what factors, under which conditions, religion contributes to peace or violence. This construction of the problem of religion and violence is limited and fits too easily into problem-solving theory. It conceptualises the problem of religion and violence as the search for the causes of specific acts of violence, with an emphasis on what is disturbing social order rather than on a society’s continuities, its reciprocities, which become part of the unveiled or apocalyptic mimetic escalation of violence. Mimetic theory offers a more holistic conception of violence and the sacred for a global age. It is relevant to policy-making, but most people and policy-makers do not like the message of prophets. Its purpose is to expose, to reveal, the scapegoat ideology so that it can be overcome in our own societies, in foreign policy and in other countries. These concerns among mimetic theorists fit with critical theory’s conception of theory as social critique, and as everyday social practice in international relations. Critical theorists are concerned about culture, power and existing social arrangements, how they came to be this way, what maintains them, and if they should be changed; this fits with the main insight of mimetic theory – innocent people are often victimised to maintain social order and international security. Theory as everyday social practice means theorising is not just what scholars or policy-makers do. Each of us, in what we consume, how we live and how we engage with others, lives out every day a theory of international relations.82 The purpose of these case studies was to show the relevance of this type of theorising for examining how the sacred, religion and violence underlie the cultural foundations of social order in any state or society – including the West and not only tran- sitional or developing countries. The brief case study on the construction of religious violence and the scapegoat mechanism showed how a set of concepts have reinforced a conception of ‘the West’ with a selective, antagonistic, view of Islamist movements. It is not going to help the public move beyond a scapegoating ideology towards genuine understanding. The links between scapegoating religion and securitising religion require further exploration. The discussion of mimetic theory and ethnic conflict shows the benefits to political analysis of using a more functional rather than substantive definition of religion. It can at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

20. Thomas 327 help reveal how religion, the sacred and scapegoat ideologies relate to the violent cultural foundations of social order. This is important in order to better understand what is erupting through unveiled violence in many conflicts in the world so that a society can promote social order in ways that move beyond the scapegoat mechanism. Acknowledgements Thanks to William Cavanaugh, A. Alexander Stummvoll, Jodok Troy and the anonymous reviews for comments on earlier drafts. Declaration of Conflicting Interest The author declares that there is no conflict of interest. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Author Biography Scott M. Thomas lectures in international relations at the University of Bath, United Kingdom, and is a research fellow at Heythrop College, University of London. at University of Bath - The Library on July 3, 2015mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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