SEMINAR: Religion, State and Society Seminar Series: Notes on the Epistemology of Religious Violence

CMSS’s Religion, State & Society Seminars will explore the role of religion in shaping lived experiences of Muslims in the contemporary globalised world. This involves exploring the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslim in political, social, cultural and economic spheres at local, national and global levels. Seminars will be on various topics, including terrorism and radicalisation, gender issues, democratisation, and secularism.

3 August Seminar by Professor Graham Brown

Title: Notes on the epistemology of religious violence

Across the social sciences, the hypothesized role of ‘religion’ in ‘religious’ violence varies widely. At one extreme, popularised in works such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, religion difference in and of itself is seen as the cause of religious conflict. At the other extreme, many development economists – including myself – have sought to ‘explain away’ religion by focusing on socio-economic characteristics. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory, however; as the historian Keith Wrightson notes of the English Civil Wars, violence can ‘mean different things to different people’. In this talk, I will critically review these different approaches to understanding religious violence and tentatively propose a framework for bringing them together, drawing on the conceptual apparatus of ‘discursive institutionalism’.

Register via: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/myevent?eid=26775501245