Rethinking religious violence: Towards a mimetic approach to violence in international relations
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088214555464 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2015, Vol. 11(1) 61 –79
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088214555464
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Rethinking religious violence:
Towards a mimetic approach
to violence in international
relations
Scott M Thomas
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to use René Girard’s mimetic theory in order to rethink
the thorny relationship between religion, culture and violence and to relate it to some
of the key issues in international relations theory. In doing this, I will examine the
concept of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’, which underlies much scholarly research
on religion and international relations – what factors, under which conditions, does
religion contribute to peace or to violence. As I will show, mimetic theory questions,
or at least reconfigures, the mainstream construction of the problem of religion and
violence – the violent eruptions that disturb social peace and social cohesion – to
critically examine the sources of the unveiled, hidden, violence and the scapegoat
ideology that operates in domestic society and in foreign policy to maintain any
society’s cultural and political order.
Keywords
Foreign policy, mimetic theory, religious violence, the sacred
Introduction
A recent and crucial research question that has inspired many scholarly debates is under
what conditions is religion a cause of international conflict – war, civil war and terror-
ism? The most influential answer has come from R Scott Appleby (1999), who argues
the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ is rooted in the very nature of religion. This is why
religion is associated with the best, noblest, sentiments of human beings and also with
the most hateful, horrible, violence. The ambivalence of the sacred, or at least one of the
Corresponding author:
Scott M Thomas, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, 1 West
North, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: s.m.thomas@bath.ac.uk
555464IPT0010.1177/1755088214555464Journal of International Political TheoryThomas
research-article2015
Article
62 Journal of International Political Theory 11(1)
influential ways Appleby’s insight has been interpreted, underlies the construction of
‘religious violence’ – religious terrorism and religious civil wars, as a relatively new
concept in mainstream political science and international relations. It underlies much of
the scholarly research on discrete events, or violent eruptions in the existing social
order, and asks what factors, under which conditions, does religion contribute to peace
or to violence? (Philpott, 2007, 2013).
However, mimetic theory questions, or at least reconfigures, this understanding of the
problem of religion and violence. An important part of mimetic theory is how culture,
religion and violence are related (so it is not narrowly a theory of religion and violence).
The reason is that mimetic theory’s basic concepts – such as mimetic desire, mimetic
rivalry, the scapegoat mechanism, and veiled and unveiled violence – are part of a gen-
eral theory of the origins and maintenance of culture.
Mimetic theory, rather than seeking to explain the ambivalence of religion and vio-
lence, shockingly argues quite the contrary. Violence is at the very heart of the sacred,
and throughout history it has been central to the way societies have socially constructed
culture, religion and the sacred. The sacred and sacred violence underlie any society’s
founding myths and its sense of solidarity – and not only countries with dictators, auto-
crats, state failure, civil wars or humanitarian emergencies. This is not recognized on an
everyday basis in a society’s cultural institutions; it is ‘veiled violence’, and so the shock-
ing argument of mimetic theory is concealed – peace, solidarity and social order are
produced through violence.
In mimetic theory, violence is neither limited to only one of the levels of analysis
– state, society or the international system – nor does it divide the world between
zones of peace and zones of violence or turmoil (Singer and Wildavsky, 1996). It does
not separate questions about why there is violence between states (international wars)
or violence within states (civil wars) and questions about why there is peace within
states (social order) and why there is peace between them (international order). The
reason is that mimetic theory is concerned with how the social dynamics – mimetic
rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, which produce social order or disorder within
states – are also integrally related to the social dynamics that produce international
order or disorder between them. In other words, mimetic theory offers a holistic and
global approach to the study of culture, religion and violence in the one world we all
live.
Therefore, mimetic theory shifts the optic through which the problem of religion
and violence is interpreted. Its purpose is to expose, to reveal, the sources of the
unveiled, hidden, violence that occurs in our own countries, in our foreign policies and
in foreign countries – the object of our national security or international security. It
does this so that we can begin to overcome the kinds of scapegoat ideologies that pro-
duce destructive forms of social order in domestic society, in foreign policy and in
international society.
The first section of the article briefly examines the invention of the concept of ‘reli-
gious violence’ and why this offers too limited a conception of the problem of religion
and violence. Substantive definitions of religion (i.e. as a set of ideas, doctrines or
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