A look at how contemporary politics and media have reinvented the sacrificial victim, often under the guise of justice or ideological purity.

The contributors to this volume don’t just echo Girard; they challenge and expand his work. They ask whether the "revelation" of the scapegoat mechanism—the Christian insight that the victim is innocent—has truly freed us from violence, or if it has simply made our conflicts more desperate as we lose the ancient tools used to end them.

How modern societies, despite their claims of secularism, still rely on Girardian "sacred" structures to contain internal conflict.

The influence of René Girard’s mimetic theory has rippled far beyond the walls of theology and literary criticism, finding a profound and unsettling home in the study of human history and social order. In Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2 , the focus shifts from the foundational mechanics of mimesis to the visceral, often bloody ways these forces manifest in the real world.