Systemics of Violent Religious Nationalism

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.

The role of religion in the evolution of peace

“…Instead, Glowacki's observations support a systems approach, where negative feedback from raids and revenge cycles led to the cultural evolution of multiple factors contributing to peace, including changes to the religious system itself. Elsewhere we have shown that the religious system is an adaptive complex, comprised of local variants of the core building blocks of any religion, including authorities, meanings, moral obligations, myths, rituals, the sacred, taboos, and supernatural agency beliefs (e.g., Kiper & Sosis, 2020). These serve various psychological and social functions, rendering religion as an adaptive mechanism that can promote cooperation and coordination (Sosis, 2019).…”

The evolution of peace

“…Instead, Glowacki's observations support a systems approach, where negative feedback from raids and revenge cycles led to the cultural evolution of multiple factors contributing to peace, including changes to the religious system itself. Elsewhere we have shown that the religious system is an adaptive complex, comprised of local variants of the core building blocks of any religion, including authorities, meanings, moral obligations, myths, rituals, the sacred, taboos, and supernatural agency beliefs (e.g., Kiper & Sosis, 2020). These serve various psychological and social functions, rendering religion as an adaptive mechanism that can promote cooperation and coordination (Sosis, 2019).…”

“…For instance, in communities throughout postconflict regions of the Balkans, shocks to local systems brought about by war contributed to various cultures of transitional justice (Kiper, 2019). But these shocks were not equivalent for all communities.…”

Remembering the Causes of Collective Violence and the Role of Propaganda in the Yugoslav Wars

“…From 1991 to 2001, the former Yugoslavia fell into a decade-long civil conflict in which irredentists clashed with Serbian nationalists over succession from Yugoslavia, resulting in insurgencies and sieges in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina, and Albania. The outcome was a devastating series of wars characterized by collective violence, including over 140,000 persons killed, 50,000 women raped, and two million refugees (International Center for Transitional Justice 2020; Kiper and Sosis 2020, 50). Soon after Yugoslav succession, the ICTY was established by Resolution 827 of the UN Security Council to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the customs of war, including grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.…”