16 Japanese War Crimes during World War II based on redefinitions of socially accepted values or limitations. Violence, however, can never cease to exist, as it provides “an always existing possi ble course of action for human beings and is therefore always at least pres ent as a menace.”16 As such, violence is a likely expression of specific human emotions—no more, no less. It is “nothing uncommon.”17 Excluding ordered violence or genocide during war, violence is usually not planned in the long term. Instead, everyday perpetrators unthinkingly use violence to achieve ends driven by anger or hate. However, if a perpetrator develops a positive emotional perception of using violence, it becomes self-serving and goes beyond specific emotions, and, as such, becomes purposeless. The use of violence for its own sake becomes something else: cruelty.18 One must emphasize that in this context, violence is seldom rational and cannot be explained following rational categories and rules.19 The desire or impulse to be violent is often contained by existing social norms as such, motives need not fuel violence, and motive alone cannot fully explain violence. In most cases, violence is not premeditated, as it usually arises from specific interactions between human beings—perpetrators and victims, to be more precise—that determine if and to what extent violence is used.20 Historians and social scientists refer to assailants’ motives to explain violence, but they often realize that motives are frequently constructs to explain acts after the fact and do not explain the true root of the violence in question.21 For example, murderers might try to legitimize their actions by formulating motives such as self-defense. Because soldiers kill as part of their professions, their jobs can be considered their motives. To name one possible narrative, this form of “work” can be legitimized by war itself or by self-defense against enemies during war. That also means that postact narratives may be fabrications that cannot fully explain acts, and as American sociologist Jack Katz put it, “If research subjects can reliably report why they do the things we want to understand, who would need us?”22 The “why” of certain acts can therefore only be partially reconstructed yet if we compare different of actual violent eruptions (e.g., by soldiers) to develop a palette of scenarios factors that reappear whenever violence occurs, we might narrow down pos si ble violence-stimulating parameters to better understand in which situ- ations violence is most likely to manifest. Although motives can be any one of such parameters, they alone do not create perpetrators. To put it simply, those who hate their neighbors are not often violent against them by default, even if they would like to be. To legitimize violence, a space-time continuum must exist that allows people to be violent without fearing legal consequences. War is such a space-time continuum in which law and order are reshaped and the use of violence is sanctioned as a tool to wage and eventually win the conflict at hand.
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