Jordan Kiper

Shaking the tyrant's bloody robe.

Abstract. Group violence, despite much study, remains enigmatic. Its forms are numerous, its proximate causes myriad, and the interrelation of its forms and proximate causes poorly understood. We review its evolution, including preadaptations and selected propensities, and its putative environmental and psychological triggers. We then reconsider one of its forms, ethnoreligious violence, in light of recent discoveries in the behavioral and brain sciences. We find ethnoreligious violence to be characterized by identity fusion and by manipulation of religious traditions, symbols, and systems. We conclude by examining the confluence of causes and characteristics before and during Yugoslavias wars of disintegration.

War propaganda, war crimes, and post-conflict justice in Serbia: an ethnographic account

Recent international criminal trials of incitement have brought about a novel precedent for prosecuting war propagandists that not only moves incitement from being inchoate to causally proven but also neglects the voices of perpetrators. Following recent ethnographic research in Rwanda, this article examines the new precedent and suggests that incitement should return to being inchoate. The discussion centres on interview data collected among Serbian veterans of the Yugoslav Wars about the degree to which wartime media motivated them during the breakup of Yugoslavia and interview data collected among Serbian prosecutors about the alleged influence of Serbian wartime media. Serbian veterans report that they were not motivated by wartime media but rather former conflicts, peer-to-peer stories on the frontline and evident threats to Serbs. Moreover, prosecutors’ assumptions about the influence of war propaganda and the unwillingness to interview ‘perpetrators’ about their motivations illuminate the complexities of post-conflict justice in Serbia.

Do Human Rights Have Religious Foundations

AbstractDo human rights have religious foundations? Among philosophers and theologians, the question tends to invite two standard replies. Some accept the boundary between the secular and the religious, and say that the universal protection of freedoms, possessions, and duties associated with human rights extend beyond any religious system. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the moral standards within human rights are inherently religious. In this paper I propose a third position. By taking the perspective of relative universalism, I draw a distinction between the conceptualization and implementation of human rights. The former is a historical process that is arguably bereft of religion, while the latter is a dynamic process that often embraces it. This distinction motivates my central thesis: although religion is absent from the normative and historical foundations of human rights, the realization of human rights in some regions of the world today often requires it.

Sacred Versus Secular Values: Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion and Their Implications for Religious Freedom

In his chapter for this volume, Justin Barrett develops the view put forward by Robert McCauley that “religious expression in beliefs and practices is nearly inevitable inmost people.”This view is based on recent advances in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion (CESR, henceforth), and is otherwise known as the naturalness of religion thesis: the claim that because religion is part of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic history of human beings, it is natural to humanity. The purpose of this chapter is to examine this claim and explore some of its implications for religious freedom, the principle that people are free to choose their own religious beliefs, and governments should not enforce a uniform state religion or seek to eliminate all religious expression. The primary question wewish to address is: if religion is indeed natural to humanity, should it be afforded special political protections safeguarding its expression? At first blush, it may appear that the answer to this question depends on how the alleged naturalness of religion is understood. We argue, however, that regardless of where religion lies on the naturalness spectrum, CESR offers few convincing normative reasons per se for protecting religious expression in terms of naturalism, and, on the contrary, it may provide compelling reasons to be cautious about blanket protections of religious expression. Our central thesis is that religious freedom may be a fundamental political right that deserves legal protection, but the

The Logic and Location of Strong Reciprocity: Anthropological and Philosophical Considerations

In this chapter, we provide a philosophical and anthropological analysis of strong reciprocity. We begin our analysis by outlining the logical argument for strong reciprocity in detail, drawing attention to its most questionable premises. We then address the most critical issue facing strong reciprocity: the lack of ethnographic evidence for strongly reciprocal behavior in the real world, outside of economic games. We conclude that (1) despite some weak premises, the foundational argument for strong reciprocity is logically sound, and (2) while it is very unlikely that strong reciprocity is an artifact entirely limited to experimental settings, it is difficult to detect the behavior in nonexperimental contexts. Lastly, we suggest that while the impulses of strong reciprocity can motivate justice and fairness, one of the reasons that strong reciprocity is difficult to detect in real-world contexts is that cultural forces influence and often limit the manifestation of strong reciprocity impulses.

Why religion is better conceived as a complex system than a norm-enforcing institution

Although religions, as Smaldino demonstrates, provide informative examples of culturally evolved group-level traits, they are more accurately analyzed as complex adaptive systems than as norm-enforcing institutions. An adaptive systems approach to religion not only avoids various shortcomings of institutional approaches, but also offers additional explanatory advantages regarding the cultural evolution of group-level traits that emerge from religion.