Citation

Roberts J. Peace Change 2009; 34(4): 471-492.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Peace History Society; Peace and Justice Studies Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1468-0130.2009.00595.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many kinds of killing have been considered permissible by some people in some times and places, ranging from human sacrifice to child exposure to stoning for adultery. Prominent among these has been the killing of both combatants and noncombatants in war. This article discusses the treatment of war and its avoidance in a comparative history course that I gave at the City College of New York in the spring of 2008 entitled Ancient and Modern Killing. We studied two ancient and two modern wars as case studies. Though we gave consideration to a variety of perspectives from the fields of anthropology and sociology, the bulk of our energy was devoted to the underlying psychology of warfare as we examined why people so often make the seemingly peculiar decision to sacrifice their lives and/or those of their children.