RAVEN

Since the 1990s — that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Islamist terror, the crisis of social history and the related rise of cultural studies —, the relationship between religion and armed violence has returned to the forefront of scholarly and popular attention, generating a veritable cottage industry that seeks to account for the intensity with which humans often kill — now and in the past. Yet even the sharpest historical narratives have left open whether one can reduce religious factors at play in armed violence to materialist or evolutionary psychology forces. Furthermore, scholarship has privileged issues of causality over “conditions of possibility”. Have religions historically conditioned how warfare was conceived of and have they shaped the ways warfare took? And if so, in which dimensions, how, and to what degree? Or are key dimensions of war — motivations, conduct, limitations, experience, and commemoration — principally shaped by so-called anthropological universals? Answers to these questions — important also for current policies — can only be provided by a resolutely comparative approach. In order to avoid direct political instrumentalisation, to promote the respective competences of the recognised researchers in the field who are participating in this project, to ensure a critical distance from this burning issue, and finally to avoid the hasty generalisations that are too often invoked by reactionary political groups, the chosen period is deliberately pre-colonial. Thus RAVEN will muster four premodern ensembles: (a) Christian western and central Europe; (b) syncretistic Buddhist Japan; (c) Imperial China; and (e) Muslim Maghreb. That a religion can shape significantly warfare is suggested by Buc’s publications to date [2015, 2016, 2017, 2019], which argue that Christianity and its secularised offspring account for substantial reiteration of patterns in Western History when it comes to war and terror. On the contrary, Buresi’s past publications on the border between Islam and Christendom in the Iberian Peninsula [2004] and the geo-history of Islam [2005-2018] have stressed the dissociation of armed violence and religious factors and the importance of political, economic, and social factors in the making of the so-called religious wars: jihad and Reconquista. The project will allow, among other things, to test whether characteristics of the Christian imprint on Western culture apply more generally to non-monotheistic cultures and if anthropological and contextual factors shape the practice of armed violence and its narratives more than the religious ones. Across all four ensembles, so as to avoid both dispersal and narrowness, RAVEN will focus on the following nine thematic Work Packages: WP1— Deciding; WP2— Fighting; WP3— Ordering; WP4— Narrating and memorialising. These four Work Packages can be envisaged along several complementary dimensions: (1) practice, for which the analysis of material and archaeological evidence is particularly important; (2) theory, which requires more specifically the study of legal and normative sources; and finally (3) narratives, which involve more varied types of sources: literature, poetry, anthropological and iconographical evidence. Significant results can be achieved only by an international team of specialists in the four geographical and cultural areas, which will coordinate all four work packages, and guide innovatively coherent units of senior researchers, but link them as network crossing areas and problematics.