The battlefields are spaces of death and destruction. In the combat zone soldiers fight and kill while witnessing the death of their comrades. These unprecedented life experiences are regularly shaped by strong emotional responses. In this paper I analyse the complex emotional dynamics of fighting and killing in the combat zone. I explore the war-time experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought in the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper is based on the interviews I conducted with the members of the Croatian Army and the Bosnian Serb Army who had direct experience of the battlefield. The focus is on the relationship between emotions and violence in the theatres of war with a spotlight on the personal experiences of fighting and killing. The paper challenges the existing interpretations of this phenomenon and argues that the killing in war is neither uniformly easy nor unvaryingly difficult but is context-dependent, variable and highly contingent. Furthermore, the acts of fighting and killing do not automatically trigger pre-existing and stable emotions but the violent processes themselves generate distinct emotional dynamics. Rather than simply following the violent actions emotions are in fact often made in the very acts of fighting and killing.

In 1963, unrest in Sudan's three southern provinces (today's South Sudan) escalated into a civil war between the government and the Anya-Nya rebellion. The subsequent eight years of violence has hitherto largely escaped scrutiny from academic researchers and has remained a subject of popular imagination and politicised narratives. This article demonstrates how this history can be explored with greater nuance, thereby establishing a local history of a postcolonial civil war. Focusing on the garrison town of Torit, our research reveals a localised and personalised rebellion, made up of a constellation of parochial armed groups. This new history also demonstrates how these parties built upon experiences from imperial conquest and colonial rule when entrenching violent wartime practices such as mass displacement and encampment, the raising of local militias and intelligence networks, and the deliberate starvation of civilians — all common methods in subsequent wars.