"The violence of civil wars–“the main form of mass political violence–“has not yet been studied systematically. In this paper, the author studies a particular aspect of this violence, namely massacres, based on data collected during recent research into the Greek Civil War. He proposes three methodological approaches to studying massacres: firstly, not to isolate them from other forms of violence; secondly, not to remove it from its context, but to situate it precisely in the sequence of events to which it belongs; and thirdly, to support claims with empirical and theoretical research."