Besides the family, almost every other societal institution figures in the cultural shaping of violence.

Law and order function to check violence, ideally, but both policing and sol­diering are sites for the socialization of forceful violence, not just for prevention of or for defense against violence. Politics impacts all other institutions, including the legal, by be­ing increasingly implicated in their constitution and regulation. Politics also articulates interests beyond the local and even beyond the nation-state, through practices often lack­ing in transparency. Such issues tend to be spatially expansive-unto-global and tempo­rally infinitely recursive, such as the situations examined in these chapters.