Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts: Emotions, Symbols, and Perceptions

Abstract

Abstract Rather than assuming that every modern state and society is a unitary and rational actor, Chapter 2 opens with a discussion of what psychology tells us about how people think and what sociology tells us about social life. Accordingly, complementary theories and propositions on security, religion, and nationalism, and emotions, symbolic predispositions, and perceptions, are synthesized to develop the ethnoreligious othering framework. The model incorporates these factors at individual, group and state level of analysis to allow a more holistic but still nuanced, accurate, and systematic method for explaining ethnoreligious otherings and violent protracted conflicts. It consists of and proceeds in three interdependent stages: cultivation of hostile emotions of ethnoreligious nationalism; securitization of ethnoreligious others using hostile symbolic predispositions; and sacralization of hostile perceptions of ethnoreligious identity, homeland, and territorial nation-state. The chapter claims that conflicts are bound to re-emerge and remain entrenched if these mechanisms and elements are disregarded.