Motivating a perpetual war

[Feo Takahari]

How can I set things up so that various factions of demons constantly fight each other, preventing a proper government from forming in Hell? I've already put three factors in:

1): New demon lords constantly arrive in Hell, having been damned from Earth.

2): By and large, demon lords are awful people.

3): Demons survive by drinking liquid emotion, and there's never enough of it in Hell to go around.

Still, this seems insufficient. Even with resource scarcity, it seems like a coalition would eventually form to distribute resources among established demons and kill any new demons who arrived. (The dead in Hell go somewhere else--nobody knows where.) Anyways, what else can I add to prevent any demon lord from surviving longer than a few centuries before someone kills him, and to prevent any government from lasting longer than six months before crumbling?

Edit: I should add that demon lords arrive in Hell with the ability to summon and bind lesser demons, and that the longer they live, the more they can bind at once. Two demon lords who can each bind twenty lesser demons have some motivation to team up to kill one who can bind thirty--after all, he could become quite a nuisance if he lives long enough to bind forty.

[Graylorne]

Habit. Fighting becomes a way of life. Your whole organisation is geared to fighting, if you stop your faction crumbles.

[shangrila]

They could just be greedy, or power hungry.

[James Chandler]

If you have various factions, it seems there would be competition for recruiting better and stronger demon lords in order to strengthen your faction. So, while one faction may try to kill new demon lords, others may be trying to protect them at least long enough to recruit them. And, to second Shangrila, do not forget the fundamentally greedy nature of evil. While there could be some system of distribution of resources, there would be constant competition for controlling the system. Have fun.

[Jabrosky]

A lot of Native American cultures practiced a ritualized form of warfare that tended to last for generations but was actually low in intensity most of the time, with few people getting hurt or killed; it was mainly a means for young men to gain prestige within their society. In some of these cultures, merely sneaking up on an enemy and touching him with a stick was even more prestigious than actually killing him. I don't know if that's the kind of warfare you're interested in though.

[T.Allen.Smith]

Counting coup I think that is called?

[Queshire]

You could have a long lists of inncidents for each faction that they want revenge against the other factions for, sort of a "remember the alamo" (not sure if that's how you spell it) type of dealie.

[ArielFingolfin]

Actually factions tend to fight when there's not one powerful leader (just look at the Moors in Spain). Each faction leader has his own ideas about how things should be, and you've already got a strong foundation for discord in the constant arrival of new leaders, which creates constant upheaval.

[Caged Maiden]

I'm reminded of my role-playing days. I used to play vampire the masquerade and it was a constant battle to survive, gain power and then maintain it. Loyalty was easily switched, power balances shifted, and lesser members easily bribed. Even when someone is powerful, a handful of weaker people can usually rise up.

[Brian Scott Allen]

Generally a perpetual war has an ideological element to it that no side can agree on. Further these sides must consider this ideology as the ultimate end thus making compromise impossible, combine this with resource scarcity you mentioned and you should be all set.