In popular representations of violence, human-on-human attacks are depicted as historically pervasive, easy to do, and almost unavoidable. In such views, close-range fighting is regularly perceived to be very similar across time and space. These popular representations are often reinforced by some academics who argue that human violence has an immutable character: ‘war has an essence that remains the same irrespective of time period or technology levels … this essence stems from individual human psychology’ (Martin 2018: 4). Hence if fighting is understood to be a biological and psychological given then this phenomenon does not require much explanation. If violence has a fixed essence and as such does not change much across history, geography, and micro-interactional contexts, there is no need to study its social mechanisms.