About 3000 Albanian families are caught up in blood feuds; the adult males hunt each other down; the reasons are long forgotten.
These blood feuds are common in rural Albania, which is rather lawless. Efforts to resolve them are largely futile because each family wants to be the last to get revenge.
Observers, of course, look upon these feuds with horror. For those involved, they are the down side of a Doomsday machine that keeps order in rural lawless areas.
Proper film buffs will remember the great scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Anthony Quinn and his son rode into the camp of a rival tribe on their own to demand payment for the water they were using.
Lawrence asked why did they go in because they could be so easily killed. Anthony Quinn said he was in no danger because if he was killed there would be a blood feud between his clan and the offending clan. This kept order. The linked clip is just fascinating rather than the actual clip.
Of course, film buffs also remember that a blood feud almost destroyed the entire Arab revolt. Lawrence resolved it by executing the murder so that he neither died at the hand of the rival clan but the rival clan felt vengeance had been satisfied.
David Friedman wrote on how feuds are common in many legal systems in their early days:
Feud is one of the mechanisms by which legal rules are enforced. Its essential logic is simple: If you wrong me, I threaten to harm you unless you compensate me for the wrong. The critical requirement for it to work is some mechanism that makes my threat more believable when you actually have wronged me than when you have not, some way of converting right into might, in order to prevent the enforcement mechanism from being used instead for extortion.
For a simple example, consider the feud system of the Rominchal gypsies, the largest gypsy population in England. If you wrong me, I threaten to beat you up. Both of us know that if you have wronged me, as judged by the norms of our community, my friends will back me and your friends won’t back you, making it in your interest to either compensate me or leave town.
Feud system have existed in many human societies. In addition to the Rominchal, well recorded examples include saga period Iceland and traditional Somali. In the Icelandic case, the mechanism for converting right into might was an explicit law code and a court system. You sued the person who wronged you. If you won, the verdict was a damage payment he owed you. If he failed to pay, he was outlawed and had two weeks to leave Iceland, after which it was legal to kill him and tortious for anyone to defend him. That system functioned for about a third of a millennium, producing substantial amounts of violence only in the final fifty year period of breakdown.
The Somali version was somewhere between the Icelandic and the Rominchal, with customary law and customary mechanisms for setting up courts to arbitrate disputes, along with a fascinating system of prefabricated coalitions to deal with both paying damages and enforcing their members’ claims.
Feuds work well as a deterrent mechanism, but if someone triggers a feud, there is a lot of mayhem. That is why third-party arbitration comes into play to prevent abuse and escalation.
I am not too sure how feuds work well if someone is murdered without a witness or is poisoned or in some other way surreptitiously done away with.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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