Introduction: The Criminology of War, What Is It Good For?

Abstract

During 2014, Ruth Jamieson produced a long-awaited edited collection entitled The Criminology of War, published by Ashgate. This substantial reader evidenced a wide-ranging collection of progressive literature—sourced from both within and outwith criminology—relating to the study of war. Despite the existence of such extant literature, however, in the opening comments, it is noted that a sustained engagement and awareness of war as a criminological concern has not always been evident. Jamieson (2014: xiii) observes that as an area of ‘intellectual curiosity’ war has had intermittent attention paid to it by criminology as a discipline, with interest waxing and waning as wars and armed conflicts have emerged and seceded throughout the decades. Moreover, it is noted that when war has been addressed it has been previously treated as a ‘bounded historical episode with discernable beginning and end points’ (Jamieson 2014: xiii) rather than as articulations of power, power relations and (geo)politics within the international domain. The following year in 2015, we produced an edited collection of our own entitled Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders, published by Routledge (see Walklate and McGarry 2015). This contained a differently constituted set of original essays intended to make some new conceptual inroads into the ways in which we—as criminologists—engage with war as a theoretical, methodological and empirical endeavour. Although noting within our introduction that ‘criminology, and indeed its sub-discipline victimology, have yet to address war in the substantive ways demonstrated by other disciplines’ (McGarry and Walklate 2015a: 2), our intention was to debunk the myth that criminologists had failed to engage with war at all. Instead, we drew attention to some of the substantive criminological areas where war had been studied, theorised and researched from within the margins of the discipline. Drawing on a previous discussion raised by Hagan and Greer (2002), we professed that the marginal nature of debates regarding war within criminology was due to this constituting ‘deviant knowledge’ (qua Walters 2003), comprehension that would be insouciant to the centrefolds of a criminological enterprise invested in by state institutions.