Political Violence and Meaning-Making

Scholars have explored in detail how wars and other major security events have generated long-term social, political, and economic changes, impacting the lives of millions. Researchers have conducted far fewer studies on how such events have impacted how people view the meaning of life and other questions of ultimate meaning. We also do not know how these may, in turn, shape collective politics in the long term—what I call the existential generativity of organized political violence. Still, there is evidence, such as by Jewish writers after the Holocaust, that mass political violence has prompted deliberation on questions of ultimate meaning among ordinary people and public intellectuals. This article argues for a multidisciplinary, comparative, synthetic, and empirically grounded research agenda on these matters. It presents supporting evidence from two cases, Holocaust survivors and the Syrian diaspora. This research agenda must include religion, as religions as social systems produce shared narratives and practices regarding questions of meaning, including ultimate meaning. However, the Syrian and Jewish cases suggest it is also vital to explore modes of meaning-making that are not explicitly religious. The article concludes with wider implications of the existential for the study of religion and global politics.