This book has marshaled theory and evidence to demonstrate that there is logic to violence in civil war and that violence against civilians cannot be reduced to opaque madness. Shakespeare and Goethe had the right intuition: There is logic in madness and hell has its laws. The popularity of the assumption that violence is impenetrable has contributed to a proliferation of hand-waving explanations for violence emphasizing collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures that have low explanatory power. At the same time, the logic of violence in civil war turns out to be very different from widespread but rather tautological interpretations positing that violence is used because “it pays.” Such views confuse the rationality of choices with the optimality of outcomes, and derive the former from the latter and vice versa.

Instead, the goal of this book has been to specify exactly if, how, when, where, and for whom violence “pays.” Simply put, indiscriminate violence is an informational shortcut that may backfire on those who use it; selective violence is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst – but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. In both instances, violence is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as the relative nonviolence of the “front lines” of civil war.