RELIGION and CONFLICT RADICALIZATION and VIOLENCE in the WIDER BLACK SEA REGION Colectia, , CÃRTI ÎN LIMBI STRÃINE

IULIAN CHIFU, OANA POPESCU, BOGDAN NEDEA RELIGION AND CONFLICT RADICALIZATION AND VIOLENCE IN THE WIDER BLACK SEA REGION Colectia, , CÃRTI ÎN LIMBI STRÃINE (3) IULIAN CHIFU, OANA POPESCU, BOGDAN NEDEA RELIGION AND CONFLICT RADICALIZATION AND VIOLENCE IN THE WIDER BLACK SEA REGION Bucureşti, 2012 Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României Religion and conflict: radicalization and violence in the Wider Black sea region / coord.: Chifu Iulian, Popescu Oana, Bogdan Nedea. - Bucureşti : Editura Institutului de Ştiinţe Politice şi Relaţii Internaţionale, 2012 Bibliogr. ISBN 978-973-7745-71-2 I. Chifu, Iulian (coord.) II. Popescu, Oana (coord.) III. Nedea, Bogdan (coord.) 341.9 32.01 Tehnoredactare computerizatã: SANDA STROESCU © IULIAN CHIFU, OANA POPESCU, BOGDAN NEDEA ISBN 978-973-7745-71-2 Chapter 1 CONFLICTS, CONFLICTS OF IDENTITY. RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS. CHARACTERISTICS AND SPECIFICITIES IULIAN CHIFU Conflicts and Typologies The definition of conflicts can be found in many disciplines and schools of thought and has been worded in various manners. As a result, as conflict is a common place, many specialized courses even avoid a definition as such1. In the academic world, in the field of international and even intra- national conflicts, we operate with a definition2 that includes, invariably, the existence of two or more parts that want, at the same time, an element of power — authority, resources, or prestige/status, that have the resources and are willing to spend them and even decide to spend them with a view to obtain the element that they want. The definition captures, simultaneously, the three fundamental elements of power: authority — political power, resources — economic power and symbolic power — prestige, recognized status (power issues note). Obviously, there are variations that emphasize more on interests — political, economic, status — or on authority (instead of power) — political, economic or symbolic, but the essence and substance of the three dimensions are found or re- produced in any formula. The definition we operate with introduces the transition from potential — having the resources to acquire the desired item — to the will stated, expressed and, finally, to action, to the actual spending of resources. The dis- tinction must be made, as it marks a hierarchy in the degree of polarization and the desire to achieve the desired item, from the potentiality of entering a dispute with an important opponent, who commands respect and, possibly, considering negotiating or ignoring a request of the opponent — to the will stated, located in space of credible threat — which may determine the opponent, of course, to reconsider the dispute, in which case the risk of entering ———————— 1 Denis J. D.Sandole, Sean Byrne, Ingrid Sandole-Staroste and Jessica Senehi, Handbook of Con- flict Analysis and Resolution, Routledge, USA and Canada, 2009. 2 Iulian Chifu, Analiza de Conflict, Editura Politeia SNSPA, Bucharest, 2004. 8 IULIAN CHIFU an open conflict is obvious — and the conflict in itself, fully expressed. From the Galtung’s curve perspective, the first part, of potentiality, would consist in divergences, antagonisms, to polarization, the second, from polarization to the onset of the conflict, and the last, from the onset of the conflict and manifest violence, with all means, to cease fire3. The three elements that are part of a dispute — Power/authority, Resour- ces and Prestige/status — are also defining for a potential classification of conflicts4, namely in conflicts authority, conflicts of attribution and conflicts status. Obviously, it’s worth mentioning that there is no “pure-breed” type of conflict: a separatist conflict has to do with land and resources, and, at the same time, with the comprehensive authority over a regional component, and with prestige — the status of internationally recognized state; having resources, means, in principle, having access to political authority and prestige; the same applies for either form of power held: with authority, one envi- sages the access to resources and to a status that entails prestige and, conver- sely, one who is famous and has a certain status has access to resources and authority. Further on, we will focus, in the first instance, on that component of conflicts status that have to do with prestige, with moral, scientific, religious, symbolic authority, because this is an important component of conflicts with deep causes or, as Ho-Won Jeong would call them, non-realistic conflicts5, which are not related to concrete elements such as authority or materials resources, but to ideals and symbolic elements that can generate conflict even without having the resources to undertake it; this type of conflicts has a significant degree of irrational, emotional6 motivation. The nature, the causes and the dynamics of each conflict are different, nuanced, and depend on context, on rationality and, more recently, according to the neo-liberal institutional cognitive approach, on the perception of each party on the conflict. However, the understanding of the inter-group, national, inter-state, global conflicts resides in the elements related to three levels of analysis7: human motivation — with its psychological reasons, social in- teraction models, pertaining to groups, with the particular relevance of social psychology and sociology — and the institutional level8 — related to political sciences, international relations and conflict analysis. The distribution of authority and resources and the access to positions of decision — intra- nationally and internationally — is the third level of analysis. The causes and ———————— 3 Oliver Romsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution, second edition, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005. 4 Iulian Chifu, op. cit. 5 Ho Won Jeong, Understanding Conflict and Conflict Analysis, Sage, Los Angeles-London-New York-New Delhi, Singapore, 2008, p. 43. 6 Idem, p. 49; Dominique Moisi, The Geopolitics of Emotion, Anchor Books, New York, 2009. 7 Ho Won Jeong, op. cit., p. 44. 8 Eric Stern, Crisis Decisionmaking: A Cognitive Institutional Approach, Swedish National De- fense College, Elanders Gotab, Stockholm 2003. CONFLICTS. CHARACTERISTICS AND SPECIFICITIES 9 the reasons of conflicts are interrelated and influence, fuel or mitigate each other, as appropriate. As for conflicts of status, they include in their substance symbolic elements that address, simultaneously, the three levels; they have to do with basic human needs, with defining elements of any group and collective struc- ture of human society, just as they have to do with the reason to exist and the place of institutions in the society, with their functionality and the social life structured in objectified forms of society, which have acquired their own self-awareness and reason to exist9. The causality remains, in the case, conflicts of status10, hence the relevance and importance of studying the sources of conflicts. There are schools of thought that see conflict as fundamentally bad, irrational in nature and undesirable11, others believe they are deeply related to human nature and the result of either the primary animal origin12, explaining humans’ inclination to violence and conflict with instincts and basic needs, Freud’s internal psychology13 or elements of collective memory, frustration, anger and other psychological variables of human groups, where the expe- rience lived in common, rather than instincts, determine violent behaviour and trigger conflicts14, which are deeply connected and amplified by poor communication and misperceptions. In addition, some researchers link conflict of its embedding into social structures (starting from Marx) that shape social life and realities in a wrong manner and have a certain latency, a delay to changes occurring in society, with complementary reactions as well — based on inertia, convenience, mi- nimum resistance and agoraphobia fostered by common, habitual environ- ment — to any social, institutional, regulatory change, causing behavioural changes15. Thus, behind hostility and antagonism, there are often imbalances of power, economic disparities and discrimination on the basis of collective identity which generate sufferings16, reflected in the construction of the cognitive-institutional scaffolding. Returning to Jeong’s classification, in realistic and non-realistic conflicts (for conflicts of authority and attribution and, respectively, for conflicts of ———————— 9 Claudette Lafaye, Sociologia organizaþiilor, Editura Polirom, Iaºi, 1998. 10 Ho Won Jeong, op. cit., p. 44. 11 Wright S.C. and Taylor, D.M., “The Social Psychology of the Cultural Diversity: Social Stereo- typing, Prejudice and Discrimination”, in MA Hogg and J. Cooper (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology, London/Thousand Oaks, CA/New Delhi: Sage, 2003, pp. 432-457. 12 Lorenz, evolutionists, Darwin. See K. Lorenz, On Aggression, New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966. 13 Sigmund Freud, “Why War?,” in Collected Works, vol. 16, Imago, London, 1933. 14 R. Brown, Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups, Basil, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. 15 S. Tormey, J. Townsend, Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism, Sage, London, 2006. 16 Ho Won Jeong, op. cit., p. 54. 10 IULIAN CHIFU status), he labelled as realistic those conflicts that stem from material shor- tages, limited administrative and management positions and other objective circumstances that create a gap between interests on the one hand and aspira- tions and

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