Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Vol 14, No 1 (2020)

The Systemics of Violent Religious Nationalism: A Case Study of the Yugoslav Wars

Jordan Kiper, Richard Sosis
Issued Date: 5 Aug 2020

Abstract


What universal features of the mind interact with specific ecologies to produce expressions of violent religious nationalism? To shed light on this question, we focus on a case study of the Yugoslav Wars, asking: How did different religious groups in the Balkans move from cooperative relationships to violent ones? We argue that the most prevalent theories invoked to answer this question fail to adequately explain the change, namely, both the rise and fall of violent religious nationalism in the Balkans. To that end, we employ a systemic framework of religious change to examine historical data and ethnographic interview excerpts from ex-fighters and survivors of the Yugoslav Wars. This framework takes religion as it is practiced by communities to be a complex adaptive system, and models how religions adapt to local socioecologies. In employing this framework, three questions are addressed: (1) What features of cognition contributed to religiously motivated mass violence; (2) Which constituents of the religious system triggered those features; and (3) What socioecological factors were those constituents responding to? We argue that popular support for religious violence—and eventually its rejection—involved a set of higher-order functions, which McNamara calls the centralized executive self. This decision-making system was decentered by religious specialists who raised social pressures; group rituals that sustained community engagement; and identity-markers that signaled group commitments. While support for violence was a response to community threats during state-level succession, the eventual rejection of violence by religious leaders and communities was due to socioecological factors, such as rising health threats and declining birth rates brought about by the wars.

Download Media

PDF (Price: £18.00 )

DOI: 10.1558/jsrnc.38700

References


 

Alcorta, C.S., and R. Sosis. 2005. ‘Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols: The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex’, Human Nature 16:323-59. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-005-1014-3.

Anzulovic, B. 1999. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (London: Hurts & Co.).

Appleby, R.S. 2000. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (New York: Rowman & Littlefield).

Armatta, J. 2010. Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Miloševic/ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391791.

Boljević, I. et al. 2011. Reči I Nedela: Pozivanje ili Podsticanje na Ratne Zlocine u Midijima u Srbiji 1991–1992 (Beograd: Studija Tuzilastva za Ratne Zlocine Republike Srbije).

Broz, S. 2004. Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War (New York: Other Press).

Bulbulia, J. 2012. ‘Spreading Order: Religion, Cooperative Niche Construction, and Risky Coordination Problems’, Biology and Philosophy 27.1: 1-27. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9295-x.

Brubaker, R. 2012. ‘Religion and Nationalism: Four Approaches’, Nations and Nationalism 18.1: 2-20. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00486.x.

Brubaker, R. 2013. ‘Beyond Ethnicity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37.5: 804-808. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.871311.

Brubaker, R. 2015. Grounds for Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674425293.

Brubaker, R. 2016. Religious Dimensions of Political Violence (Max Weber Lecture Series, 2016/5; Badia Fiesolana: European University Institute).

Cigar, N. 1995. Genocide in Bosnia (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press).

Cigar, N. 2001. ‘Serb War effort and Termination of the War’, in B. Magas and Zanic (eds.), The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (London: Frank Cass Publishers): 200-235.

Coclanis, P.A. 2013. ‘Terror in Burma: Buddhists vs. Muslims’, World Affairs 176.4: 25-33.

Denison, B., and J. Mujanovic/. 2015. ‘Syria isn’t Bosnia. And no, the problem isn’t “ancient hatreds”’, Washington Post, 17 November. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/17/syria-isnt-bosnia-and-no-the-problem-isnt-ancient-hatreds/?utm_term=.0babb0e7b29f.

Donia, R. 2014. Radovan Karadžič: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (New York: Cambridge). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139683463.

Fischer, R., and D. Xygalatas. 2014. ‘Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 14: 345-55. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342130.

Fox, J. 2004. ‘The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945–2001’, Journal of Peace Research 41: 715-31. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343304047434.

Fukase-Indergaard, F., and M. Indergaard. 2008. ‘Religious Nationalism and the Making of the Modern Japanese State’, Theory and Society 37.4: 343-74. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9055-8.

Gagnon, V.P. 1997. ‘Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia’, International Security 19.3: 130-66. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2539081.

Gallagher, T. 2003. The Balkans after the Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy (New York: Routledge). Doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203398180.

Glenny, M. 1996. The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books).

Gorski, P. 2000. ‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism’, American Journal of Sociology 105: 1428-68. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/210435.

Gorski, P., and T. Turkmen-Dervisoglu. 2013. ‘Religion, Nationalism, and Violence: An Integrated Approach’, Annual Review of Sociology 39: 193-210. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145641.

Harakas, S.S. 1993. Living the Faith: The Praxis of Eastern Orthodox Ethics (Brookline, MA: Light & Life Publishing).

Harden, B., and C. Gall. 1999. ‘Crisis in the Balkans: The Serbian Orthodox Church; Church of Miloševic/’s Rise Now Sends Mixed Message’, New York Times, 4 July.

Heimola, M. 2012. ‘Religious Rituals and Norms in the Making of Adaptive Systems’. PhD diss., University of Helsinki.

Hill, K., and A.M. Hurtado. 1996. Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter).

Hinton, A. 2002. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Los Angeles: University of California Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520230286.001.0001.

Hinton, A. 2005. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Hogbin, I. 1970. The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea (London: Chandler Publishing).

IOM. 2008. Migration in Serbia: A Country Profile 2008 (Geneva: International Organization for Immigration).

International Center for Transitional Justice. 2009. ‘The Former Yugoslavia: Transitional Justice in the Former Yugoslavia’. Online: https://www.ictj.org/publication/transitional-justice-former-yugoslavia.

Jegindo, E.M., L. Vase, J. Jegindo, and A. Geertz. 2013. ‘Pain and Sacrifice: Experience and Modulation of Pain in a Religious Piercing Ritual’, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 23: 171-87. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2012.759065.

Judah, T. 2000. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Juergensmeyer, M. 1996. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Kaplan, R. 1993. Balkan Ghosts (New York: St. Martin’s Press).

Keys, A.B. 1991. ‘A Time of Transition for Religion in Yugoslavia’, Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 11.3: 1-20.

Kiper, J. 2015. ‘War Propaganda, War Crimes, and Post-Conflict Justice in Serbia: An Ethnographic Account’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19.5: 572-91. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2014.992882.

Kiper, J. 2018. ‘Propaganda and Mass Violence in the Yugoslav Wars: A Post-Conflict Ethnography’. PhD diss., University of Connecticut. Online: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/1735.

Kiper, J., and R. Sosis. 2016a. ‘Why Terrorism Terrifies Us’, in M. Taylor (ed.), Evolutionary Psychology and Terrorism: New Perspectives on Political Violence (New York: Routledge): 102-23.

Kiper, J., and R. Sosis. 2016b. ‘Shaking the Tyrants Bloody Robe: An Evolutionary Perspective on Ethnoreligious Violence’, Politics and the Life Sciences 35: 27-47. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2016.7.

Kiper, J., and R. Sosis. 2017. ‘The Logic and Location of Strong Reciprocity: Anthropological and Philosophical Considerations’, in M. Li and D. Tracer (eds.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Fairness, Equity, and Justice (New York: Spring): 107-28. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58993-0_7.

Kohlmann, E. 2004. Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (New York: Berg-Oxford International Publishers).

Kunda, Z. 1999. Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6291.001.0001.

Kuper, L. 1977. The Pity of it All: Polarization in Racial and Ethnic Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Lee, E.M., et al. 2016. ‘Altered States of Consciousness during an Extreme Ritual’, PloS ONE 11.5: 1-22. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153126.

Lehmann, H. 1982. ‘Pietism and Nationalism: The Relationship between Protestant Revivalism and National Renewal in the Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Church History 51.1: 39-53. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3165252.

Leustean, L.N. 2008. ‘Orthodoxy and Political Myths in Balkan National Identities’, National Identities 10.4: 421-32. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608940802519045.

Luhrmann, T.M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage). Doi: https://doi.org/10.24260/alalbab.v1i1.16.

Mamdani, M. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691193830.

Mann, M. 2004. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817274.

McNamara, P. 2009. The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511605529.

Mestrovic, S.G. 1993. Habits of the Balkan Heart: Social Character and the Fall of Communism (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press).

Mestrovic, S.G. 1996. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York: New York University Press).

Mieczyslaw, P.B. 2010. Regime Change in the Yugoslav Succession States: Divergent Paths toward a New Europe (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Mojžes, P. 2016. Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing).

Oberschall, A. 2012. Propaganda, Hate Speech and Mass Killings’, in P. Dojčinović (ed.), Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law: From Speakers’ Corner to War Crimes (New York: Routledge): 171-200.

Perica, V. 2014. ‘Religion in the Balkans’, Oxford Handbooks Online. Online: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935420-e-37.

Power, E.A. 2017. ‘Discerning Devotion: Testing the Signaling Theory of Religion’, Evolution and Human Behavior 38: 82-91. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.07.003.

Purzycki, B.G., and R. Sosis. 2013. ‘The Extended Religious Phenotype and the Adaptive Coupling of Ritual and Belief’, Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution 59.2: 99-108. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15659801.2013.825433.

Radic, R. 1998. ‘Serbian Orthodox Church and the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in P. Mojžes (ed.), Religion and the War in Bosnia (Atlanta: Scholars Press): 161-67.

Ramet, S. 2005. Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492136.

Ramet, S. 2006. The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2005 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

Rapoport, D. 1984. ‘Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions’, American Political Science Association 78.3: 658-77. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1961835.

Rapoport, D. 2013. ‘The Four Waves of Modern Terror: International Dimensions and Consequences’, in J.M. Hanhimäki and B. Blumenau (eds.), An International History of Terrorism: Western and Non-western Experiences (New York: Routledge): 282-310.

Rappaport, R.A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (London: Cambridge University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814686.

Ray, L. 2006. ‘Mourning, Melancholia and Violence’, in D. Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan): 135-56. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627482_7.

Rieffer, B.A. 2003. ‘Religion and Nationalism: Understanding the Consequence of a Complex Relationship’, Ethnicities 3.2: 215-42. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796803003002003.

Seligman, A.B., and R.P. Weller. 2012. Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199915262.001.0001.

Sells, M. 1996. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Sells, M. 2003. ‘Crosses of Blood: Sacred Space, Religion, and Violence in Bosnia-Hercegovina’, Sociology of Religion 64.3: 309-31. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3712487.

Sosis, R. 2011. ‘Why Sacred Lands are not Indivisible: The Cognitive Foundations of Sacralizing Land’, Journal of Terrorism Research 2: 17-44. Doi: https://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.172.

Sosis, R. 2016.Religions as Complex Adaptive Systems’, in N. Clements (ed.), Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan): 219-36.

Sosis, R. 2019.The Building Blocks of Religious Systems: Approaching Religion as a Complex System’, in G.Y. Georgieve, J.M. Smart, C.L. Flores Martinez, and M. Price (eds.), Evolution, Development and Complexity: Multiscale Models of Complex Adaptive Systems (New York: Springer): 421-49. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_19.

Sosis, R. 2020. ‘Four Advantages of a Systemic Approach to Religion’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion 42: 142-57. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420905019.

Sosis, R., and J. Kiper. 2017. ‘Sacred versus Secular Values: Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion and Religious Freedom’, in T.S. Shah and J. Friedman (eds.), Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 89-119. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108381536.005.

Sosis, R., E. Phillips, and C. Alcorta. 2012. ‘Sacrifice and Sacred Values: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religious Terrorism’, in T. Shackelford and V. Weeks-Shackleford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War (New York: Oxford University Press): 233-53. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738403.013.0014.

Štitkovac, E. 1997. ‘Croatia: The First War’, in J. Udovicki and J. Ridgeways (eds.), Burn this House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia (New York: Laurence Hill Books): 154-74.

Thompson, M. 1992. A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (London: Vintage).

Tomasevic/, J. 1975. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Vivod, M. 2015. The Master and its Servants: The Entangled Web between the Serbian Secret Service, Organized Crime and Paramilitary Units in Yugoslav Conflict (New York: Nova Publishers).

Wallace, A.F.C. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House).

White, G. 2007. Nation, State, and Territory: Origins, Evolutions, and Relationships (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

Wimmer, A. 2008. ‘The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory’ American Journal of Sociology 113: 970-1022. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/522803.

Wood, C., and R. Sosis. 2019. Simulating Religions as Adaptive Systems’, in Saikou Diallo et al. (eds.), Human Simulation (New York: Springer): 209-32. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17090-5_12.

World Bank. 2018. ‘Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman): Serbia’. Online: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.

Xygalatas, D., et al. 2013. ‘Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 13: 1-16. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342081.

 

Zı/vkovic/, M. 2011. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Miloševic/ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

 


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.





Equinox Publishing Ltd - 415 The Workstation 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)114 221-0285 - Email: [email protected]

Privacy Policy