ABOUT - Religion and Violence Symposium

RATIONALE FOR SYMPOSIUM

The motivation for organizing this symposium is that extant social scientific explanations of religious violence typically focus primarily on causes like social political, cultural and environmental factors. For example, it is common to attribute to a violent act by a member of al-Qaeda the label of “Islamic terrorism” based upon specific Islamic beliefs about jihad. Such attributions imply that Islam, or some of its doctrines, is the primary cause of the violent act, when in fact it is, at most, a facilitator. The purpose, then, of this symposium is to re-frame the way we approach the study of religious violence in-line with the tenets of evolutionary psychology, a field combining insights of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.

Our project will make use of the most recent advances in evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary psychology of violence. Scholars in these two areas have made significant strides in developing knowledge of the specific evolutionary roots of religion (see Boyer 2001 for an overview) and the evolutionary roots of violence (see Wilson and Daly 1988 for an overview). However, to date almost no effort has been made to combine insights from these two research domains toward understanding the dynamics of religiously motivated violence. This symposium serves to launch such a project.

We will bring together experts who work directly and indirectly in these areas in order to facilitate the improvement of existing research projects and potentially develop new ones. The topics covered will likely include, but not be limited to, coalitional reasoning, decision-making, mate selection, and hazard-management.

SYMPOSIUM FORMAT

Invited contributors (presenters and respondents) will submit abstracts of their presentations prior to the start of the workshop. These papers will be posted on this website so attendees may have an idea of the content in advance. Each session will have a targeted theme and a group discussion will follow the talks by the presenter and respondent.

Because space is limited those who would like to attend the symposium and take part in the group discussions must put in a request using this link . These requests will be considered as long as space is available.