Mark Juergensmeyer

Terror mandated by god

Religions renewed political presence on a global scale is often accompanied by violence ‐ in part because of the nature of religion and its claims for power over life in death; in part due to the nature of secular politics, which places its own legitimacy on the currency of weapons and can only be challenged successfully on a military level; and in part due to the nature of political violence. The symbolic power of violence can be a valuable commodity for religious as well as for political forces. Through violence, the proponents of a religious ideology like Aum Shinrikyo remind the populace of the godly power that makes their ideology potent, and at times religious activists create man‐made incidents of terror on Gods behalf.

The global rise of religious nationalism

The global rise of religious politics is found in every religious tradition, spurred on by the widespread perception that secular nationalism is an ineffective and insufficient expression of public values and moral community in a global era in which traditional forms of social identity and political accountability are radically transformed. Religious violence is an expression of this anti-secular protest and the symptom of a longing for a renewed sense of morality and values in public life.

Christian Violence in America

As the millennium approaches, the wave of antimodernism that has brought violent movements of religious nationalism in its wake around the world has arrived at Americas shores. In the United States, attacks on abortion clinics, the killing of abortion clinic staff, and the destructive acts of members of Christian militia movements are chilling examples of assaults on the legitimacy of modern social and political institutions, based on the theological frameworks of reconstruction theology and Christian Identity thinking. These examples of Christian militancy present a religious perception of warfare and struggle in what is perhaps the most modern of twentieth-century societies. The secular political order of America is imagined to be trapped in vast satanic conspiracies involving spiritual and personal control. This perception provides Christian activists with both the justification and the obligation to use violent means to fulfill their understanding of the countrys Christian mission—and at the same time offers a formidable critique of Enlightenment society and a reassertion of the primacy of religion in public life.

What is Global Studies

Global studies is transnational. Global studies focus on the analysis of events, activities, ideas, trends, processes and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions. The term “cultural regions” is meant to apply to associations of people bound together by a common language, religion, and heritage that are defined within a particular geographical area but may not be demarcated as a nation, or have occurred historically before the concept of nation was applied to states.

What the bhikkhu said: Reflections on the rise of militant religious nationalism

The recent rise of militant religious nationalism in such places as Sri Lanka, Punjab, Iran, Egypt, Israel and elsewhere has created the impression that there is something wrong with religion in these parts of the world. The author of this article, reporting on his extensive interviews with a radical bhikkhu in Sri Lanka, concludes that the problem is with the Western ideal of secular nationalism. It does not easily fit with traditional political identities and it is sometimes seen as a vestige of cultural colonialism. The author presents four options in the relation of secular nationalism and religion, and raises the question of whether we, as secular Westerners, can adjust to a world increasingly filled with religious nationalists.

The Gandhi Revival—A Review Article

The film Gandhi is one of several events that have recently brought Gandhis ideas to public attention in India and the West. In this review of the field of Gandhian studies, the author looks at the literature that probes beneath the popular images of the man. The author identifies some of the landmark works in the field and assesses recent publications. He finds that in India, especially, the emphasis is on the application of Gandhian ideas to movements for social and economic change.

Commentary: Tahrir Square, the Death of Bin Laden, and the Revival of Civil Society

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the decade of the War on Terror. It was not a good moment for the world, nor for civil society, as John Clark appropriately points out in his essay on the rocky road of civil society organizations. Yet the world is changing. The 2011 arrival of the Arab Spring mass movements for democracy—so strikingly successful in Cairo’s Tahrir Square—and the death of Osama bin Laden, the putative leader of global jihad, on 2 May of this year, has put a whole new spin on the globe. In the first moments after the announcement that bin Laden had been killed by an American military raid in Pakistan, some commentators breathlessly announced that the War on Terror was also, now, officially dead. To the extent that this is so, it is good news for civil society. The departure of the threat of violence is welcome news; even better is the arrival of new nonviolent movements for social change in the Middle East. These movements are themselves part of the non-profit, non-government, civic-minded spirit of civil society. In a matter of months, the mood of anti-authoritarian violence has shifted from the strident rhetoric of violent jihad to the Twitter and Facebook conveyed messages of democratic popular organization. Hence the killing of bin Laden did not kill the jihadi movement; it was merely the nail in its coffin. What radically changed the portrait of protest was the legion of cell-phone toting protestors in Tahrir Square. They have helped us to complete the erosion of legitimacy that has undermined the jihadi activists in recent years within the Muslim world. For the past 30 years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Journal of Civil Society Vol. 7, No. 3, 293–295, September 2011

Gandhi vs. terrorism

Dædalus Winter 2007 Immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the idea of taking a nonviolent stance in response to terrorism would have been dismissed out of hand. But now, after the invasion and occupation of two Muslim countries by the U.S. military, the loss of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Afghanis and Iraqis, and the start of a global jihadi war that seems unending, virtually any alternative seems worth considering. It is in this context that various forms of less militant response, including the methods of conflict resolution adopted by India’s nationalist leader, Mohandas Gandhi, deserve a second look. Like us, Gandhi had to deal with terrorism, and his responses show that he was a tough-minded realist. I say this knowing that this image of Gandhi is quite different from what most Westerners have in mind when they think of him. The popular view in Europe and the United States is the one a circle of Western paci1⁄2sts writing in the 1920s promoted–the image of Gandhi as a saint. In a 1921 lecture on “Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?” John Haynes Holmes, the pastor of New York City’s largest liberal congregation, extolled not Lenin or Woodrow Wilson or Sun Yat-sen but someone whom most of the crowd thronging the hall that day had never heard of–Mohandas Gandhi.1 Holmes, who was later credited with being the West’s discoverer of Gandhi, described him as his “seer and saint.”2 In fact, the term ‘Mahatma,’ or ‘great soul,’ which is often appended to Gandhi’s name, probably came not from admirers in India but from the West. BeMark Juergensmeyer

Can we live with religious nationalism

In the early months of the Iranian revolution, some American scholars refused to accept it as genuine. They thought it was only “an unfortunate interruption of the historical process” they believed had been leading Iran inexorably toward a Western‐style liberal political system. Many Westerners still believe that, and are waiting for Iran to return to its senses. Yet, elsewhere in the Muslim world, Irans revolution is seen quite differently: it is viewed as part of the “march of history” that Muslim nationalists in Algeria recently proclaimed in celebrating their own successful elections. Their view of history culminates in a world filled with religiously‐oriented nations.

Religious Nationalism and the Secular State

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by T.N. Madan, volume 19, pp. 13123–13127,