Religion and Violence: Governing Muslim Militancy through Aesthetic Assemblages

Abstract

One of the ways in which the relationship between religion and violence has been conceptualized is through the concept of "radicalization". In the wake of the London bombings, "radicalization" became a favored policy term that was reinvented in order to manage and prevent the new phenomenon of "homegrown terrorism". Around 2005, it was a widespread assumption that "homegrown terrorism" had a religious dimension, and the concept of "radicalization" therefore had to articulate how religion and terrorism were related. Most concepts of radicalization describe a cognitive transformation, where the progressive adoption of radical religious ideology is the first step in a process thateventually-could lead to terrorism.The argument that religion and violence are connected through intellectual processes can also be found in academic literature. Max Weber, who studied the relation between religion and practice, famously argued that a specific Weltanschauung-a protestant ethics-was paving the way for an ascetic practice that contributed to the growth of capitalism. 1 More precisely, it was a specific interpretation or rationalization of religious dogma (the idea of predestination) that subsequently made religious actors act in specific ways. Weber's influence on the study of religion before and after 9/11 cannot be overestimated. Recently, Cecelia Lynch has proposed a neo-Weberian model of how to understand the relationship between religion and violence. "(W)e must first assess", she writes, "what religious guidelines suggest for particular situations, and then look more deeply into how religious actors interpret those guidelines -how they bridge the gap

How ‘gangsters’ become jihadists: Bourdieu, criminology and the crime–terrorism nexus

“…The aim is thus to develop a theoretical framework that accounts for both the role of politico-religious cultures and varying kinds of marginalization involved in the process of becoming jihadi. In these efforts, we share a spirit with those scholarly works that depart from a simplistic model of cognitive radicalization and emphasize the existential emotions (Cottee and Hayward, 2011), embodied transformations (Crone, 2014) and fractured lives (Walklate and Mythen, 2016) of contemporary Western jihadists. However, rather than according a master status to issues of marginalization, ideology or aggression, the Bourdieusian account offered here provides a dynamic understanding that captures the fluidity of identity and ideological commitment, the durability of existing modes of being and the resonances between the street and jihadi fields.…”

Digital/commercial (in)visibility

“…However, as scholars working on online Islamic radicalization have argued; to understand intertextuality and mediation in this particular context requires a willingness to engage practices more broadly, and, in particular, lay practices (e.g. O’Loughlin, 2011; Crone, 2014; Atwan, 2015; Conway, 2016). I build on this insight, arguing that this broad range of practices re-produce ‘regimes of (in)visibility’.…”

“…Engaging with the multiple layers of visual language also involves a shift from a focus on (high) culture to the wide range of affective and aesthetic sensibilities at play in these practices. Hence, in her work on the radicalization of young Muslims in Denmark, Crone (2014) critiques the ‘intellectualist’ tendency to marginalize or misrecognize the aesthetic quality of images, and therefore to misunderstand how they matter, as well as how much they matter in the production of political subjectivities. As she puts it:[A]esthetic technologies currently sidetrack traditional intellectual technologies of the self as the Koran, the fatwa or Islamist doctrine.…”

“…In contrast to intellectual technologies that primarily work through the intellect and make use of linguistics, aesthetic technologies are ‘assemblages’ in which speech, visualities, sound and materialities interact in ways that produce specific ‘frames’ of violence. (Crone, 2014: 292)Crone analyses two Danish brothers, who filmed themselves mimicking a beheading carried out by Zarkawi, to show how these ‘frames’ become integral to the ‘techniques of the body’ or the ‘ habitus’ through which radicalization takes place (Crone, 2014: 302–3). 5…”

The security captor, captured. Digital cameras, visual politics and material semiotics

“…The notable exception to this de-privileging of cameras and production agency is in Kennedy's (2009) work on soldier photography, where we see how digital cameras transform the warzone as soldiers capture routine and exceptional moments, including moments of violence, as mundane part of everyday practices, and share these moments with people who are not in the battlefield. While an increasing amount of works consider the digital mediation of images (Crone 2014;Leander 2017;Malmvig 2020), the tendency to bracket or overlook camera agency has proved surprisingly stubborn even as international relations researchers have themselves begun using cameras to do research, producing and altering images (Weber 2011;Saugmann Andersen 2012; Der Derian, Udris, and Udris 2010; Möller 2013; Särmä 2018; Lisle and Johnson 2018).…”