The study investigates the emergence and transformations of interpretive paradigms prevalent in specific groups and throughout society, based on the wartime experiences of these combatants. The biographies of former fighters demonstrate how perpetrators of violence are formed and how the dynamics of violence are organized. Although this research reveals a mosaic of different paths leading to war and of different forms of warfare, characteristic trajectories of conflict and typical forms of action also emerge, as well as the simultaneous existence of traditional and modern phenomena and symbols. Small and large groups of people, their coexistence and cooperation in wartime and their actions in a highly militarized society coalesce to form a complex structure of conflicts. Regional, cultural, and national peculiarities, idiosyncrasies in the civilian-military relationship, and special characteristics of male socialization were used as vehicles in these confrontations.
Violence is integrated into a horizon of meaning.
In other words, violence becomes the prerequisite for and means of a politics of identity, claiming as it does that the very borders which it aims to create in fact already exist. Images of the enemy and the experience of violence serve as a special means of highlighting concepts of ethnic community and are inseparably connected with organizational and institutional, cultural and interpersonal factors. Interviews can aid in reconstructing empirically how ethnicity is conceived as a compatible attribute of experience and meets with acceptance when it is associated, in a step by step process, with violence. The existential experience of violence is communicated together with the postulated existentialist community, so that it becomes directly relevant for the actions of individuals. They structure the course of events, speak of rules and conditions, of room for discretionary action and obligations, of cooperation and alienation, of the battle against death and loss.