How life has changed. A 1994 poll found more than half the children questioned said they were afraid of violent crime against them or a family member. Are these kids just paranoid, or is there a real problem?Visitors to this site who read the newspaper or follow the news on radio and television will have no trouble realizing that there is a link between conflict and violence. On the day this paper was written, we in the Washington, D.C. area were obsessed with a sniper who had killed nine apparently randomly selected victims in the preceding two weeks, a foiled suicide bomb attack in Israel, and the United States government's ongoing preparation to launch a war against Iraq.

Additional insights into violence are offered by Beyond Intractability project participants.
Not all intractable conflicts involve violence, and even for those that do the violence is not necessarily constant. Thus, in mid-2002, there was little or no fighting in Bosnia or Burundi and had not been for some time. Nonetheless, violence is often a part of intractable conflicts at one point or another in their histories.

Not all violence is part of an intractable political conflict. For instance, there have been no hints of political motivations lying behind the sniper attacks in the Washington region. However, much violence in today's world is political; indeed, depending on the estimates one believes, it took in excess of 100 million lives around the world during the twentieth century.

Violence can take many forms. In its classic form, it involves the use of physical force -- beating or torturing prisoners of war, raping women in the enemy camp, and, of course, the bombing and shooting that has made warfare so tragic since the dawn of the industrial age. Some observers claim that violence exists whenever force is used or threatened. For space reasons, this essay is limited to physical and political violence.