Acclaimed archaeologist and social scientist Özgen Kolasin, born in Istanbul, Turkey and based in Perugia, Italy, courageously tries to find an answer to a peculiar dilemma dating back to the dawn of humanity. Can violence itself solve violent situations?
In her paper called Peace Through Violence: the Sacrificial Mechanism as a Religious Resolution of Conflicts, Kolasin starts from the “scapegoat mechanism” to describe the dynamics of conflict-solving over the centuries and among different cultures by identifying an “enemy” whose killing or punishment is cathartic for the entire community. Using violence, therefore, to bring peace.
The author wisely suggests that nowadays the “scapegoat mechanism” is still used, though sneakily. For example, everyday we can find new scapegoats created by the media, and Kolasin cleverly highlights that even wars are disguised as “peace operations”, with their “collateral damages” meaning expendable victims. And who more than a scapegoat can be described as an expendable victim? And what about the gypsies, the gagè, a name which actually means “the other”? “The gagè are the scapegoats of all times for having always been different and having always been outsiders to the community. That makes them expendable“.
According to the “scapegoat mechanism”, you can always find an “outsider”, a “stranger”, someone “different”, in one word “others”, to sacrifice as a victim for the common good. Cathartic as it may appear, though, violence is violence, even if it seems to bring – an illusory – peace. Using violence doesn’t end violence, like “an eye for an eye” makes the whole world blind.
As far as Özgen Kolasin is concerned, the right way to promote peace and harmony is eliminating the “self” to be able to become one with “all”. If we all are one with “all”, to put it simply, there can be no “others”.Changing our mind sets “would reflect on larger scales by the function of the collective consciousness”. On an academic level, Kolasin hopes for a future neurological and interdisciplinary research concerning these issues and a different attitude of the mass media. Because “new narrative stories create new mind sets”.