War:

A)    The continuation of politics with an admixture of other means.  (Clausewitz, 1972; cited by Schmid 1998: http://www.fewer.org/pubs.thes.htm)

B)    A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.  (Houghton Mifflin Company 1982: 1362)

C)    Collective, direct, manifest, personal, intentional, organized, instrumental, institutionalized, sanctioned, and sometimes ritualized and regulated violence.  (v.d. Dennen, 1995; cited by Schmid 1998: http://www.fewer.org/pubs.thes.htm)

War crimes: Violations of the law or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.   (UN Geneva Conventions 1949)

War of secession: Violent conflict in which a regionally based ethnic group attempts to secede from an existing state. (Gurr and Harff 1994: 193)

Willing executioners: Deriving from Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial 1996 book documenting the active participation of “ordinary” Germans in the Nazi Holocaust. The term has been applied in other contexts to refer to a constituency's complicity and/or contribution to genocide, mass murder, or other human-rights abuses.  For example, supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa, which relied on violence and coercion, could be termed the willing executioners of that state. 

Witch hunt: An intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence. (Infoplease: http://www.infoplease.com/)