ABSTRACT
Violence is an uncomfortable and distressing reality with serious impacts upon individual and population health (see Das et al. 2001). State-sponsored violence, political oppression, and resistance are phenomena through which the power of the state is inscribed on the body, leaving long-term psychosocial and physical marks. Yet, organized violence is not limited to states. In internal ethnic conflicts, the individual-state opposition is relatively meaningless, and violence occurs in a context of social and moral disorder and absence of control that is the inverse of state repression. Moral disintegration apparent in the form of the violence and the composition of its perpetrators (nonsoldiers, children) calls for special attention to the degree to which culture shapes behavior, while the resulting demoralization requires consideration of the resilience of culture over time and through violent disruption.
