Violence, religion and the modern state

What was interesting about the media reporting of the massacre in Norway was that the religious identity of supposed perpetrators emerged in the reporting right from the start. If it was not Islamic terrorists that were responsible as first thought, the attention turned to the "fundamentalist Christian".

The political theologian William Cavanaugh has some helpful comments on this tendency. In his review of Charles Kimball's book When Religion Becomes Evil. Kimball, he observes ... wants to proscribe religious justifications of vilence because he belives that religion, with its absolutist tendencies is prone to fan the flames of violence.

... The problem is that there remain in Kimball's view, perfectly legitimate non-religious, or "secular" ways of justifying violence. Far from a condemnation of violence, Kimball's analysis results in a selective condemnation of certain kinds of violence, labelled "religion". the problem is not violence as such; there are still occasionally good reasons for bombing or shooting people. To qualify as good these reasons must be "secular".  "Secular" violence. however regrettable, is sometime necessary. "Religious" violence is always reprehensible.  (p45 )“Sins of Omission: What ‘Religion and Violence’ Arguments Ignore.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 6:1 (Spring 2004): 34–50.

The conclusion Cavanaugh draws that is relevant to the issue of considering the way we talk about the massacre in Norway, by an individual, or the current activities of the Syrian army, to quote an example at random, is that if we really want to address the problem of violence in the modern world, we must treat violence as the problem, whoever is responsible for it.An adequate approach to the probem he argues,

... would be to be resolutely empirical: under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices, jihad, the invisible hand of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the  role of the United States as a world wide liberator turn violent. The point is not simply that "secular" violence should be given equal time with "religious" violence. The point is that the distinction between "secular' and "religious" violence is unhelpful, misleading and mystifying and should be avoided altogether. (p50)

Anarchist history - getting away from the state in Southeast asia

James C Scott's latest work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009) is fascinating for the way it opens up the possibility of a fresh take on political theory as well as providing an analysis of the history of upland Southeast Asia.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, a self consciously “anarchist history,” examines the huge literature on state-making in a frame of mind that questions the accounts offered by the states themselves.

The author evaluates why people would deliberately remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.

James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” 

This is an engaging read and offers fresh perspectives for all those who are suspicious of the self agrandising and claims to self evidence offered by theorists of the emergence of the state.