Series preface

Summary

Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate are leading experts on the intersection between criminology and critical war studies and I am very pleased that they agreed to write this book. The aim of the New Horizons in Criminology series is to provide high quality and authoritative texts which reflect cutting-edge thought and theoretical development in criminology, have an international scope and are also accessible and concise. With A Criminology of War? Ross and Sandra have clearly fulfilled this brief. They rightly point out that criminologists have been interested in war for some time; for instance, citing the work of Hermann Mannheim (1941) and Ruth Jamieson (1998). The authors have also edited two volumes on the topic (Walklate and McGarry, 2015; McGarry and Walklate, 2016). Yet war is a subject that is often overlooked, or not regarded, as a central criminological concern. This is surprising. The anomie of conflict means crime and social harm are prevalent in times of war and often post-conflict as well. There are minor and more serious crimes, harms and human rights violations that can go hand-in-hand with military action, there are serious state crimes, questions regarding the legality of war and specific methods and technologies of warfare, the use of torture, genocide and terror. The authors highlight that the study of war is an inter- and intra-disciplinary endeavour, but there is clearly much that criminologists can contribute.

In this book, McGarry and Walklate build on their previous work. They draw on criminological, sociological and other literatures to explore key concerns pertinent to a criminological study of war. They consider definitions of war and different conceptions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ wars. The authors also focus on ‘the decimation of civilians via “degenerate” war violence’ as exemplified by nuclear war. There is specific attention on the historical and conceptual challenges of studying genocide as criminologists or sociologists – not least an acknowledgment of ‘the discipline's “dark” input into the biological determinism of the Holocaust’. And the authors’ claim that post-war, criminology ought to have been more concerned with genocide as a topic of interest.

McGarry and Walklate consider interconnected dialectics of war within criminology, the context being a transfer of risk over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries that seems to ‘prioritise the lives of soldiers over the deaths of civilians’.