ABSTRACT
Human beings exert tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources in order to enhance their security by attempting to prevent, regulate, or win conflicts with other human beings. Hence, human existence, especially within a group, is inevitably constrained, and often contested (Coser 1956; Simmel 1955; Sumner 1906). In violent human conflicts, especially those involving ethnic groups or entire nations, participants often have deep convictions that frrequently have bloody consequences in organized action (Galtung 1996) concerning contested geographies, historical narratives, moral grievances, religious values, or sometimes even competing cosmologies and gods.
