Religious Organizations as an Instrument of Normalization of Violence: The Examples of the Catholic Church in Rwanda and the Russian Orthodox Church

This paper analyzes the influence of religious organizations on the emergence and development of inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts on the examples of the Catholic Church in Rwanda and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The research is based on the constructivist approach, according to which a change of discourse can transform the identities of actors and form a new reality, in other words, it can lead to actions that seemed impossible under the previous discourse. The paper demonstrates how the fact that the church took part in the creation of a racist discriminatory system in Rwanda and also supported the government’s anti-Tutsi actions or stayed silent about them contributed to the emergence of a discourse that treated the killings of Tutsis as morally acceptable. This resulted in a genocide that took the lives of around 800 thousand people in 100 days. The paper also focuses on how the propaganda activities carried out by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, aimed at bringing the post-Soviet countries back under Russia’s control, became a prerequisite of the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine in 2014. Special attention is paid to the activities of the church after 2014. The fact that the church used the terms “peacekeeping mission” and “internal conflict” to describe the Russian aggression during 2014-2022 shifted the blame to the victim and made the worshippers believe in Russia’s innocence. After 2022, the open support of the full-scale war by the ROC helped the Russian authorities to ensure broad popular support for this war and justified the bloodshed from the moral and spiritual perspective in the eyes of the believers. The paper concludes that when religious organizations justify the violence, stay silent about it, or encourage it, this turns the violence into a new norm and influences the willingness of the population to take part in it, which in turn paves the way to such violent conflicts as wars and genocides.