Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding: The Role of Religious Leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina

483 Pages·2021·5.46 MB·English

by  Stipe Odak

Stipe Odak
Religion,
Conflict, and
Peacebuilding
The Role of Religious Leaders in Bosnia
and Herzegovina
Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding
Stipe Odak
Religion, Conflict,
and Peacebuilding
The Role of Religious Leaders
in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Stipe Odak
Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain (ISPOLE)
Université Catholique de Louvain - UCL
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
ISBN 978-3-030-55110-0 ISBN 978-3-030-55111-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55111-7
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To my parents
Preface: A Universe and an Origami
“Even before I start this writing, I know I will not be able to do justice to the
project.”—I said to one of my interviewees, just 2 days before the end of my field
research in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There were simply too many encounters,
details, and rich experiences that did not seem translatable into clear structures of an
academic work.
It was a long journey. For the first time in my life, I visited all the regions of the
country in which I was born and raised. It was a journey on which I had to change
many of my initial conceptualizations and modify my research strategies. New
insights arrived after each of the hours-long and often intimate interviews that I
conducted.
It was a personal journey as well. During lengthy night drives between cities,
sentences from my respondents as well as the passages from random books often
came to my mind. One of them was a line from Nicolas Bouvier’s L’usage du monde:
“One believes that they are about to make a journey realizing soon enough that it is
the journey that makes them or unmakes them.” [On croit qu’on va faire un voyage
mais bientôt c’est le voyage qui vous fait ou vous défait.]—It was not just me there
who was making this journey; the journey that was creating and unmaking me.
Besides new personal memories, there was one decisive change that I noticed
both in my thinking and my writing: a move from simplicity to complexity. While
at the beginning I had the impression that the topics I was researching were simple
and straightforward, over time I have come to acknowledge to a greater extent their
“thickness” and complexity. Now, when I am finishing this project, I try to move
backward, from complexity to simplicity. The path, however, has changed in the
meantime. As Ricœur noted in his writings on hermeneutics, the innocence of the
première naïveté cannot be regained. In the text that stands before you, I am seeking
to reach the seconde naïveté—to offer as simple as possible interpretations of the
phenomena while preserving certain critical awareness of the surplus of meaning
that will escape every conceptualization.
Another phrase that was constantly recurring in my mind was “the universe of
meaning,” which I encountered for the first time in the title of Yuri Lotman’s famous
study on semantics. It seemed to me that there was a striking parallel between the
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viii Preface: A Universe and an Origami
accounts of the origins of the universe and the process of analytical understanding.
In the beginning, there is a simple, dense matter that explodes into innumerable
particles and grows, driven by entropy, into increasing chaos. However, it is only
within that ever-growing divergence of particles that symmetries arise; in singular-
ity, there are neither parallels nor discrepancies. All “ordered” constellations, galax-
ies, geometrical patterns, and fractals are detectable only inside a dis-unified system.
Understanding seems to follow a similar paradigm. Simple ideas that I had at the
beginning exploded into a myriad of subtle differences. But within those new com-
plexities of meaning, I could see both parallels and differences, variations and simi-
larities that I am about to present. Understanding, just like the universe, is ordered
and chaotic at the same time.
There is one more image that often entered my reflections. On September 23,
2016, my promoter Valérie, my close colleague Emmanuelle, and I met in Rue du
Viaduc in Brussels to discuss our research plans. I wrote one word in the center of
my research diary: Origami. One and the same sheet of paper can be folded and
shaped in numerous forms. Similarly, the same body of data that I collected could
have been presented in various ways. This book will be an extended practice of fold-
ing and unfolding, of taking a perspective and moving backward, with the aim of
creating some meaningful models. My final hope is that, in the midst of the , there
lies a small origami.
So, now, let the universe explode!
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Stipe Odak

Contents
Part I Forgiveness
1 Field Research Findings? Delineating Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1 Punishment and Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2 The Emotional Side of Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.1 Forgiving as Emancipation from Overwhelming
Negative Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.3 Forgiving as a Spiritual State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.1 Forgiving as a Comprehensive Change in Thinking . . . . . . 19
1.4 Forgiving, Memory, and Commemoration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.4.1 The Past Weighing on the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.4.2 The Graves that Do Not Forgive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.4.3 Forgiving as Forgetting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.5 Collective Frameworks of Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.6 A Residue of Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.7 Forgiveness: An Obligation, a Supererogatory Act, Grace . . . . . . . 30
1.8 The Conditionality of Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.9 Theological Justifications for Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.9.1 Forgive as God Forgives Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.9.2 Forgiving and the Belief in Final Divine Justice . . . . . . . . . 37
1.10 Religious Leaders and Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.11 Interim Conclusion: Dimensions of Forgiving in a Religious
Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2 Theoretical Perspectives on Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.1 Emotionalist Theories of Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.2 Games of Forgiveness: Forgiveness More than Calculation . . . . . . 49
2.3 Arendt and Levinas: Forgiving as the Undoing of Time
and Regaining of Human Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.4 Derrida, Ricœur and the Unforgivable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.4.1 Public Theaters of Forgiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
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xii Contents
2.5 Against Forgiving: Resentment as a Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.6 Exorcising Forgiveness from Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3 Concluding Remarks on Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Part II Reconciliation
4 Field-Research Findings? Outlines of Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.1 From Interpersonal to Intergroup Reconciliation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.1.1 Dramaturgy of Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.1.2 Reconciliation as a Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.2 The Belief in Reconciliation as a Basis of Reconciliation . . . . . . . . 76
4.3 Reconciliation as a Discomforting Encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.4 Procedurality of Reconciliation: Bridging the Dissonance . . . . . . . 82
4.4.1 Reconciliation as an Internal Harmonization . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.4.2 Reconciliation and Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.5 Reconciliation and Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.5.1 A Need for a Historical Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.6 Time of Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
4.7 Obstacles to Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.7.1 Group Loyalty as an Obstacle to Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . 90
4.8 Reconciliation: Interim Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
5 Theoretical Perspectives on Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
5.1 History of Use and the Religious Origins of the Term . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.2 Resistance to Reconciliation: From Reconciliation
with Something to Reconciliation with Someone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
5.3 Reconciliation and Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.4 Degree Zero of Reconciliation or Reconciliation
in the Worst-Case Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.5 Degree Zero of Reconciliation in Contrast
to Perennial Enmity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6 Concluding Remarks on Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Part III Memory
7 Field-Research Findings: Even if I Hate, I Live! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
7.1 From Individual to Collective Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
7.2 The Past Was Real: Reconstructing the Past from Scraps . . . . . . . . 127
7.2.1 Phantom Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.2.2 Memory as an Authority, Memory as a Myth . . . . . . . . . . . 133
7.3 Purposes of Memory: Carrying Scars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7.3.1 Memory as Moral Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.3.2 Memory as a Lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
7.4 Memory as Pathology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
7.4.1 Collective Memories as Hysterias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139