Holy Scriptures and War: How Do Practices of Interpretation Contribute to the (De-)Legitimation of Political Violence?

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Despite strong theoretical arguments for a link between religious differences and collective violence, the empirical findings are inconsistent. This phenomenon is often referred to as the “ambivalence of the sacred” (Scott Appleby): Sometimes religions and faith communities do escalate conflicts and sometimes they work for peace. Against this background, this subproject will examine conflict management in Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The goal is to determine whether different practices of understanding and staging holy scriptures – in our cases the Bible and the Koran – contribute to the legitimization of political violence in some cases, while in other cases this is hardly possible under otherwise relatively similar circumstances. At the same time, the project will analyse whether established practices of interpretation are modified by violent conflicts and whether path dependencies can be identified with regard to text selection and text staging. The project works with a decidedly practical theoretical perspective. Methodologically, it combines a synchronous country-comparative research design ("between-case variance") with an investigation of diachronic country-specific dynamics ("within-case variance"). In a first step, catechetical literature and video sermons of selected religious communities will be analyzed to identify their practices of interpretation and staging of the Koran and Bible. In a second step, these practices of interpretation and staging will be related to attempts of political mobilization for or against collective violence. The subproject is located in Working Group C "Pragmatization" and thus investigates the practical contexts in which religious texts are integrated and have an effect as sacralized texts.