Anthropoetics, Fall 07/Winter 08:

Use and Perception of Violence: A Girardian Approach to Asymmetric Warfare
This essay is based on a paper that I presented at a conference organised by the Ministry of Defence of the Netherlands on the "moral dimension of asymmetric warfare." It combines René Girard’s theses on societal violence with the latest analyses of those modern conflicts which strategists call "asymmetric." The Western military may find in Girardian anthropology an explanation for the accrued difficulty that they meet in their missions on modern battlefields. The application of René Girard’s theses to modern warfare provides anthropologists with further evidence of the validity of these theses. More broadly, this essay challenges the relativism that has developed in Western society over the last three centuries.....