"Many Mozambican citizens fought, not one side or the other, not the governments or the militaries, but violence itself...

People there told me that to take up arms against one side or the other was to play into the very hands they fought against. They would then be reproducing the same violent politics that oppressed them. Even the militaries they fought against won if they took up arms: for they followed the model of power those militaries had set into motion. Violence would continue to define their lives. To truly defeat someone, they said, is not to act by the oppressor's rules, but to institute another set of rules altogether."