On Violence and Perpetrators 15 German historian Karl Heinz Metz, who wrote History of Violence (Geschichte der Gewalt), came to a similar evaluation of violence in relation to human exis- tence and its history: In history there is always violence—and always the longing for peace. The question about violence is probably the seminal question of the human being. From violence all religion and all politics evolve: Religion as the attempt of a symbolic answer to the question, why humans are not able to abolish violence, politics as the attempt to practically overcome vio lence by rule, which might tame it. And yet, violence never disappears, neither in the state, which cannot secure inner peace without the threat of violence, and which often uses excessive violence, as war, towards its external, nor in religion, which also becomes violent against heretics and pagans, as soon as religion begins to wish to order society after its own values.7 Evidently, violence is always “instrumental by its nature”8 and usually needs a purpose to be used. Because violence is a tool used to achieve goals, it requires justification.9 Furthermore, violence is a form of social action, which can be omnipres- ent and contingent at the same time. There has never been a society without violence, and it is likely that humanity will never be able to fully abolish vio lence.10 Even postmodern societies that often claim to have achieved this status will never exist without it, if one is to believe the Polish-British soci- ologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017).11 In any society, violence is usually not an “ontological or pre-social category, but a normative, moral, and ethical one.”12 Violence must also be defined by existing social norms, meaning that what is perceived as violent depends on the “specific chronological, social, and cultural condition and order.”13 What is individually and collectively consid- ered violent depends on developmental processes that determine and recon- figure the social order and its understanding or categorization of violence. Sociologist and director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Wolf- gang Knöbl, warned against analyzing violence with “totally new methodolog- ical and theoretical approaches,” as they are “neither helpful nor necessary.”14 Instead of making violence seem exotic and far-removed, which enables the Western perspective of having “outlived” it, examining violence closely may help people understand its probable endlessness. To analyze violence and its occurrences within specific time periods, its geographical and sociocultural contexts and the number of active players within it can be used to both char- acterize and comparatively analyze violence.15 Forms of violence are usually standardized by social norms that is, society determines what is allowed and what is not, but these norms are changeable