Ritual Media and Conflict

Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing maintaining and challenging political and economic power as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here an interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates describes and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate disseminate or escalate conflict. Each chapter built around global and local examples of ritualized mediatized conflict is multi-authored. The book''s central question is: When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media) how do the patterns of conflict change?