Preface

Summary

The study of war has a long tradition within the social sciences including the discipline of criminology. Yet despite historical evidence of war being influential within the lives, activities and the respective work of sociologists and criminologists, and the consistent emergence and cessation of wars, conflicts and genocides being the social and political tapestry against which these disciplines have developed (as variously addressed throughout this book), the study of war and its attendant subject matter have often been perceived as marginal, neglected or irrelevant to criminology (and sociology for that matter). While there may be some truth to observations of this kind, within this book we look to unsettle such ideas by making clear the connection of war with the study of criminology. At the outset of this book readers should be minded to consider (at least) two questions: is the study of war within criminology new? What is the relevance of writing this book? Let us offer some brief answers.

First, is the study of war new to criminology? As will become evident, the answer to the first question is quite simply no: the study of war within criminology is not at all a novel undertaking. Recent examples of the prestigious Radzinowicz Prize, annually awarded to the best academic article in the British Journal of Criminology, have addressed the illegal activities associated with the 2003 war in Iraq (Whyte, 2007), reconciliation processes in Afghanistan (Braithwaite and Wardak, 2013; Wardak and Braithwaite, 2013), and the Israeli occupation of Palestine (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2017). Each of the scholars receiving these awards had, of course, been thinking and writing about war for some time prior to this recognition. Interestingly, none of these scholars made reference to the seminal work of Ruth Jamieson (1998) who had long before outlined an agenda for war to be studied as an interdisciplinary endeavour within criminology. One scholar who had previously made acknowledgement of this work was Jock Young, cross-referencing it within The Exclusive Society (1999), The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) and The Criminological Imagination (2011). In this latter (final) contribution, Young (2011: 217) concluded by squarely situating Jamieson's (1998) ‘pioneering work on the criminology of war’ as part of the broader intellectual tradition of critical criminology.