Introduction

Human societies have always known group violence, and the contemporary world continues to be a violent place. Ruth Sivard (1996) estimates that between 1900 and 1995, armed conflict caused over 40 million deaths in three countries alone: Russia/the USSR, China, and Germany. Almost half of these victims were civilians. World Wars I and II were indeed cataclysmic events, which caused suffering on an unprecedented scale. And even after the conclusion of World War II, the number of armed conflicts tended, until 1992, to increase, rather than decrease, over time (Harbom and Wallensteen, 2005).