The act of killing: understanding the emotional dynamics of violence on the battlefield

Abstract

The killing of human beings is one of the defining features of war. Yet there has not been much research on understanding its emotional dynamics. The act of close-range killing in war is often interpreted through the two contrasting perspectives: the neo-Darwinian approaches which see killing as an optimal tactic of genetic survival and the micro-sociological perspectives which centre on the tension and fear that arise in an inability to forge effective interactional ritual chains. While the former approach insists that taking lives in war is relatively easy the latter perspective describes it as an extremely difficult and traumatic event. In this paper, I challenge both of these influential views and argue that the process of killing is defined by its variability, contingency and context-dependence. Rather than assuming, as the dominant perspectives do, that violence simply triggers biologically ingrained and uniform emotional responses I argue that the emotional dynamics is created through the acts of violence. Drawing on the primary research with the ex-combatants from wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991–1995) I show how the shared experience of close-range violence generates highly diverse forms of emotional dynamics.

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