A Mimetic Perspective on Conflict Resolution

Current theories of international justice and conflict resolution seem to rest on the assumption that discord among humans can, in principle, be settled by means of a fair allocation of a limited set of available goods. The assumption, in turn, is grounded in the idea (supported by John Rawls) that peoples of genuinely democratic and liberal societies "have nothing to go to war about," once their basic needs are satisfied and their fundamental interests made fully compatible with those of other democratic peoples. The article builds on Rene Girard theory of "mimetic desire" to show that the notion of "peace by satisfaction" is problematic: people needs and desires, which are mimetic in nature, are hardly extinguishable. Classical approaches to conflict resolution fail to address this mimetic dynamic and wrongly assume that there is an objective measure of desire to be filled to satisfy the contenders. The solution to the dilemma involves the reflective ability of the people engaged in a dispute to address the (mimetic) sources of their animosity. Polity (2009) 41, 536-558 doi:10.1057/pol.2009.2; published online 14 July 2009