While this book was being reviewed, war broke out in Eastern Europe. At first, images and videos of destroyed buildings, dead soldiers, people hiding in basements, and people on the move to Poland, Moldavia, and other countries, were spread by press agencies and on social media. In the European Union, discussions immediately broke out about security and armaments. Stories of grief and despair, but also of bravery and courage were widely shared. After the war grew a few weeks old, even grimmer pictures and videos reached the world; images of totally devastated residential areas, battered churches, bodies of handcuffed people lying scattered in the streets of Bucha, mass graves. The images reminded us of Aleppo, Grozny, Kabul, Mosul, Saada.
Studying religion, materiality, and conflict, it is impossible to avoid the deep historical, religious, and material dimensions of this conflict. The Russian war on Ukraine has been understood by analysts and Russia-scholars as a response to Russia’s uncertain times as a ‘great power’ (derzhavnost) that started in the 1990s. Being a great power is an important part of Russia’s public narrative and symbolic political tradition. It is how the Russian regime views the role of ‘Russia’ in the world, a narrative with often strong religious and nostalgic overtones, but also with a strong focus on threats from the outside and inside. It is also a narrative that draws heavily on Russia’s perception of its own role as Europe’s savior in defeating Nazi Germany. Justifications of this war are often loaded with references to this grand narrative. This becomes clear in phrases on genocide that would be committed by Ukrainian Nazis against Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbas. The Russian Orthodox Church shares this narrative. Patriarch Kirill endorses the war and called Russia’s military efforts an “active manifestation of evangelical love for neighbors”. The perception of this war as ‘holy’ evokes memories of the blessings of bombs destined for Syria and Crimea by Orthodox priests, a dimension that fuses religion, violence, and materiality (see the work of Dmitri Adamsky). The opening of the main church of the Russian Armed Forces in a military theme park in Moscow in June 2020 – in khaki colors and filled with weaponry and mosaics depicting battles from Russia’s history – further underlines how the Russian Orthodox Church has come to play a vital role in militant Russian nationalism. This dimension becomes tangible in the war in Ukraine. Two days before the invasion, President Vladimir Putin spoke of Ukraine as “an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space”. The autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine from the Moscow-based Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2018 and perspectives on Kievan Rus, may all play a role in efforts to claim Ukraine as part of such a space. In this context, the many reports on missiles targeting religious sites, like the Orthodox Volnovakha Temple, the St Michael’s Cathedral in Mariupol, or Uman, a site sacred to Hasidic Jews, are striking. Spaces, buildings, holy sites, weapons, and other ‘things of conflict’ all play an important role in understanding the religious dimensions of this violence. Without an effort to understand this war in its narrative, religious, and material dimensions, this conflict becomes an incomprehensible strife for power.
This volume was envisioned after we organized a seminar on religion, conflict, and materiality at Utrecht University in November 2019. The seminar was supported by the ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ program led by Birgit Meyer, which is gratefully acknowledged. We are extremely thankful to Birgit for her very constructive support throughout this project. We are also thankful to Rashida Alhassan Addum-Atta, Joseph Fosu-Akrah, Murtala Ibrahim, Kauthar Khamis, Brian Larkin, Martijn Oosterbaan, Kirsten Smeets, Srdjan Sremac, and Juliana Tesija for their valuable contributions to this seminar. They are at the source of this project and helped develop our thoughts and ideas.
We wish to thank the authors who contributed chapters to this book for drawing out such fascinating theoretical and methodological entry points to understand the role of material religion in conflict and violence. While developing this book, we received helpful comments and suggestions during a research colloquium with staff and students from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, in which our introductory chapter was discussed. We also significantly benefitted from feedback given by Benjamin Kirby on our introductory chapter, and from the keen and cooperative suggestions from the anonymous reviewer(s) on this book. We are also grateful to the University Library of Utrecht University, Paul Ziche as our director of research, and the ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ program of Birgit Meyer for providing financial contributions which allowed us to publish this book open access. While submitting our manuscript to Brill, Tessa Schild has been a great source of professional and constructive support. Last but not least, we are very indebted to Bernadette van den Berg for her fantastic help in streamlining the references and bibliographies of this work. All mistakes of course remain entirely our own.
Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema
April 2022