Summary Of The Scapegoat By Rene Girard

Rene Girard’s ideas about mimetic rivalry help explain the attempt of primarily members of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church to rid Bosnia-Herzegovina of the Muslims through ethnic cleansing during the war in 1991. In Girard’s “The Scapegoat”, he expands upon the relationship between perpetrators and their reasoning behind their acts of persecution, which accurately correlates with the persecution Muslims experienced in Bosnia during this conflict. Although it has been argued that it was not a religious war, there were certainly religious influences towards the end of the conflict as a result of mimetic rivalry. Accordingly, Girard outlines the four stereotypes of persecution.
Girard suggests that mimetic desire is the precursor

Further, mimetic rivalry ultimately causes violence, which weakens and disrupts the social order. Girard asserts that the “strongest impression is without question an extreme loss of social order evidenced by the disappearance of rules and “differences” that define cultural divisions” (Girard, 12). As a result, societal structure begins to dismember as conflicting groups are formed whereby one group becomes the perpetrator and the other becomes the victim; interestingly, the perpetrator’s goal is to restore the social

This social risk pertains to the claimed ethnic contamination imposed by the presence of Muslims in Bosnia at this time. Girard states that perpetrators “rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which costs them nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily indefinable reasons” (Girard, 14). Subsequently, persecutors “look everywhere for other likely indications-other stereotypes of persecution-to confirm their suspicion” (Girard, 15). Examples of crimes include “violent crimes…sexual crimes: rape, incest, bestiality…Finally there are religious crimes, such as profanation of the host” (Girard, 15). Persecutors undertake a hunt for the black sheep of