2. Researching Religious Terrorism

Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions - A Tribute to James R. Lewis - Margo Kitts

Mark Juergensmeyer [+-]
University of California, Santa Barbara
Mark Juergensmeyer is distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and global studies and interim director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is a pioneer in global studies, focusing on global religion, religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics. He has published more than three hundred articles and thirty books, including the recent God at War (Oxford 2020), the awardwinning Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 4th ed, (2017), and his co-edited Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (Oxford 2018).

Description

This chapter explores a common problem of those who research the topic of religion-related terrorism: how to enter into the mindset of religious activists, especially those committed to violent interactions. This is the challenge for anyone trying to make sense of people and groups that are different than themselves, a problem for textual and historical scholars as well as those applying contemporary social and anthropological approaches. This chapter advocates a form of epistemic worldview analysis that adopts an approach involving informative conversations. These emphasize relational knowledge—attempts to engage with a subject either directly or through textual analysis that brackets the investigator’s assumptions and allows the subject to frame the information from his or her own worldview.

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Citation

Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2. Researching Religious Terrorism. Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions - A Tribute to James R. Lewis. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 17-26 Nov 2024. ISBN 9781800505070. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=45185. Date accessed: 13 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.45185. Nov 2024

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