International Journal on Criminology Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2013 | Page 74

Psycho-Criminology of Sectarian Reality
In other words, it is not belief as a body of knowledge that criminology will study,
but the set of constraints in the name of which beliefs spread in coercive apparatuses
under the cover of assumptions that encase the subject in a closed and terrorist system
(life or death, life or the stock market), indifferent to law as well as to mental health.
The criminologist has nothing to say about the sect: it is a group fact, or religious
sociology fact, a psychology-of-adherence-and-membership-fact, etc. It is its “sectarian”
aspect that constitutes his object of study. By introducing a concrete project of belonging
and not a study of a doctrinal corpus (whether written prophetically or not), the term
essentially refers to practices of belief, practices linked to belief itself, and to its
conditioning. These are the behaviors and their sources of inspiration (persons, milieux,
ideologies, etc.) that will become the field 3 of criminological analysis. In other words, it
is a matter of power-taking when one speaks of the sectarian, 4 hence the possible
semantic derivatives like sectarianism. Sectarianism bespeaks the uniqueness of a point
of view, associated with the prohibition against speaking or doing differently.
Sectarianism can therefore also be found in a minority group as well as in a majority
group and it will take the empirical objects at its disposal: the assumed or revealed
knowledge in churches or schools of thought, 5,6 money in groups that manufacture goods,
mafia movements, the forces in apparatuses of control, relations to sex in sociopsychological
apparatuses that yield liberation through the body, the territories in
identitarian claims where borders are abolished, etc. In all cases, there is a single aim:
wherever there is a plurality of opinion and individual practices, to conceive of only one
formal, totally idealized type in complete accordance with the elements of dogma.
The criminologist is more than a specialist of criminal law since the question of
deviance is his/her field as well. His domain is first and foremost the domain of the
psychological sciences and the social sciences. What constitutes the criminologist's object
of study is the set of operations through which, in a context of implicit or explicit
intimidations, strategies are put in place and practiced that will progressively close off all
possibilities for a person (or a group) to continue their self-determination and in so doing
to lose themselves by taking another non-critical personality, for the sake of which the
personality itself becomes invasive.
If the criminologist has a social role and a scientific goal, it is to produce a diagnosis
of these strategies by deconstructing them into so many anti-personal and counterproductive
stratagems on the margins of norms and rights. To analyze a sectarian action
not only means analyzing dissident activities but also taking into account the ways that
dissidence contributes to the destruction/self-destruction of persons, goods, and
collectivity.
Criminological analysis centered on sectarian strategies and their impact leads us to
employ psycho-criminology: the study of enforcement practices. It will be said that these
practices are developed as a defensive process in situations that have become unbearable
or risk becoming so. They are an outcome and an imprisonment in another mental and
social status, on the basis of an imagined benefit (whose nature is connected to power,
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3 An illustration of this can be found via the philosophies that inspire penal codes on the one hand
and, on the other, penal practices. Codes and practices are supported by philosophies, ideologies,
ethics, and deontology, and their excesses are associated with what could be the disappearance of a
third, critical term recalling the relativity of any corpus and membership.
4 P. Denis, J. Schaeffer (eds), Sectes (Paris: Editions SARP, 1999).
5 Chouvier, Les fanatiques (Paris: O. Jacob, 2009).
6 J. MacDougall, Eros aux mille et un visages (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 291-302.
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