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In this chapter, I identify important perspectives in contemporary studies of war and war-related violence, and place my own research in relation to these. The perspectives used, which I have labelled instrumentality/structure, expression and experience/narrative, have developed in relation to and at times as critiques of each other; they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but reflect focuses on different phases of war and war-related violence. The first perspective attempts to explain the outbreak of war and violent acts; the second centres on the cultural meaning of violent events; and the last represents experiences with and narratives of violence, focusing on the effects of violence. The perspectives also reflect different analytical levels, falling from a macro to a micro level, which, some would claim, relates to the possibility of empirical comparison (Schröder and Schmidt 2001), an argument reminiscent of the ‘verstehen’ – ‘erklären’ contrast.