Journalists grappling with how to explain the atrocities committed in civil war often turn first to motivation, as when they attribute the extreme violence of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army to the messianic religious beliefs of its leader or the massacres in eastern Congo to the tribal battles between the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups. Likewise, most studies of revolution and civil war begin with the question of who is willing to fight. They draw attention to the motivations of combatant groups and their members. Explanations for the onset, duration, and dynamics of violence highlight such factors as economic inequality, ethnic antagonism, and political repression. These root causes of violence are believed to be crucial to making sense of who participates in rebellion: repression drives those excluded from the political system to embrace violent means to obtain power, policies shaped by ethnic favoritism force groups facing discrimination to organize, and economic inequality pits members of one social class against another. Taking motivation as the starting point in building explanations for the level and character of violence within civil war is a natural extension of existing approaches.

This book is focused, however, squarely on the processes through which organizations produce violence. Violence emerges as a strategy in different contexts and to different degrees as a consequence of the interaction between rebels and governments battling for control of the state on the one hand and civilians who choose to offer or withhold support from the competing parties on the other.