Introduction

Popular representations of violence and war tend to emphasise their ubiquity and inevitability. From elementary school history textbooks to Hollywood blockbusters warfare is depicted as an inherent and primeval phenomenon originating even before the arrival of the human species. In the indicative words of one commentator war is described ‘as old as, or older than, humanity itself’ (Low 1993: 13). Nevertheless, neither violence nor war came naturally to human beings. As several decades of research on killing, dying and other violent actions demonstrate, our species is neither good at, nor psychologically comfortable with, the use of violence (Holmes 1985; Grossman 1996; Bourke 2000; Collins 2008). Not only do human beings generally tend to avoid violent conflicts (most micro-level fights are no more than blustering), but the Hobbesian image of war of all against all is an empirical impossibility (Collins 2008). Despite the popular perception that violence is usually chaotic, contagious and generally spontaneous, much violent action entails a substantial degree of organisation. Furthermore, rather than being a primordial and intrinsic feature of human existence, the institution of warfare arrived fairly late on the historical stage. This, however, is not incidental since to conduct war requires organisational and ideological sophistication both of which emerge only with the development of civilisation.