Everyday violence claims the lives of 5 million people around the world every year. Are its causes genetic? Cultural? Are we more violent than our ancestors?

Violence claims the lives of 5 million people around the world every year. That’s 8% of all annual deaths: 2 times more than lung cancer, 3 times more than diabetes, and 6 times more than breast cancer. And yet we lack a general theory of violence, perhaps because the existing data is too widely dispersed. Social sciences, philosophy, and literature have contributed fragmentary elements that do not take data from epidemiology or the science of population health into consideration.
This book aims to provide a general explanation of human violence by focusing on everyday violence—that is, physical and personal violence occuring outside of war.