Introduction
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 literatureâsourced from both within and outwith criminologyârelating 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 âintellectual curiosityâ 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 âbounded historical episode with discernable beginning and end pointsâ (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 weâas criminologistsâengage with war as a theoretical, methodological and empirical endeavour. Although noting within our introduction that âcriminology, and indeed its sub-discipline victimology, have yet to address war in the substantive ways demonstrated by other disciplinesâ (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 âdeviant knowledgeâ (qua Walters 2003) comprehension that would be insouciant to the centrefolds of a criminological enterprise invested in by state institutions.
Although having different agendas for how to re-engage criminology with the study of war, within Transgressing the Borders we shared two sets of interrelated observations with Jamieson (2014). First, we professed that the supine nature of criminology in this domain generally means that it only tends to assert its interests once war erupts as a public concern, particularly when impacting on matters of criminal justice (McGarry and Walklate 2015a; Jamieson 2014). However, in the process of constructing this current edited collection (The Palgrave Handbook on Criminology and War), an article published in the Official Newsletter of the American Society of Criminology had suggested something quite different. John Hagan (2015) makes the case that although equipped with the requisite legal and conceptual tools of international statutes and policy, criminology has been âsilentâ on the particular issue of the 2003 war in Iraq as a âwar of aggressionâ. Advocating the use of political philosophy for levelling a critical debate on both the initiation (ad bellum) and aftermath (post bellum) of warfareâsimilar to his previous critiques (see Hagan et al. 2012)âhe accused criminology of âsleepingâ in the wake of these events (Hagan 2015). Whilst we agree entirely with Haganâs (2015: 4) reminder that âwe too easily forget how disingenuous the lead-up to this war wasâ, and concur that there is much merit in advocating for more critical legal attention to be levelled at the conduct of war from within criminology (particularly in the case of Iraq), it would be incorrect to take this accusation against what he refers to as âAmerican criminologyâ as constituting the conduct of the entire discipline. As Ronald Berger (2016) partially noted in the rejoinder to Haganâs (2015) claims, it is well established, for example, that work has been ongoing for some time analysing the international legal and humanitarian implications of the war in Iraq (see Enemark and Michaelsen 2005; Kramer and Michalowski 2005, 2006; Winston 2005), the consequences for Iraqi civilians resulting from sectarian violence and state victimisation (see Green and Ward 2009; McGarry and Walklate 2015b), in addition to the economic and financial criminal costs of the war in relation to corporate criminality and domestic crimes (see Whyte 2007; Hagan et al. 2012). This point leads us to our second collective observation. As this evidence suggests, during the past decade or so critical criminologists in particular have more formally coalesced around issues of war, security and terrorism in the wake of the attacks in North America on 11 September 2001 (9/11) (Jamieson 2014; McGarry and Walklate 2015a). It is therefore perhaps more appropriate to suggest that the inattention paid to war within criminology also has much to do with the selective interests of an Occidental disciplinary criminology rather than an inherent intellectual narcolepsy. Evidence of this selectivity from critical scholars of criminology is also implicit within Hagan (2015) and Bergerâs (2016) accounts. Rather than war being depicted as a âbounded historical episodeâ within criminology (qua Jamieson 2014) Hagan (2015: 4, emphasis added) instead suggests,
The Vietnam and Iraq wars were violent bookends of a recent generationâs contribution to the crimes of aggressive war. American criminology has a neglected capacity and unfulfilled responsibility to explain where, why and how these âsupremelyâ serious crimes occurred.
With some notable exceptions (see e.g. Green and Ward 2004), for critical criminology perhaps the most remarkable admission during this âbookendedâ period of war is the lack of criminological attention paid to the Gulf War in 1991. Whilst it is not our intention here to provide a full analysis of our own, as an exemplar, Jean Baudrillard (1991/1995) depicted the violence of this war as characterised by the US military limiting their engagement in interpersonal violence and maximising the lethal (unseen) consequences of vehement military technology. In doing so, as the title of his book suggests, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, only an uneven conflict against an unimagined âenemyâ who were decimated virtually and en masse by a more aggressive and powerful state (Baudrillard 1991/1995; Patton 1991). Drawing from Baudrillardâs (1991/1995) analysis, realist criminologists may have looked towards the conduct of the Gulf War by the USA and UK as a war politically framed and justified in the context of âdeterrenceâ, functioning âas a preventative electroshock against any future conflictâ and âshepherdingâ âforeignâ nations into US imperialist systems of democracy (Baudrillard 1991/1995: 84; Patton 1991). Cultural criminologists might have chosen to follow this as a war of âsimulacrumâ wherein the gross nature of warâs violence became neutralised via the imposition of âauthenticâ representations of reality, virtually transmitted to a distant public via âreal timeâ news footage and war reporting (Baudrillard 1991/1995). Or perhaps critical criminologists may have been keen to illustrate the asymmetric dominance of Iraq by the US military. By pursuing violence rationalised as being in the interests of âjusticeâ for Kuwaitis, a superior, technologically advanced form of violence was exerted upon Iraqi forces at the behest of the human rights of the civilian Iraqi population (Baudrillard 1991/1995; Patton 1991). The disciplinary selectivity of criminologyâs failure to address the 1991 Gulf War also has consequences for those embarking upon the criminological study of war in the current context. As we learn from Martin Shaw (1991: 207) in Post-Military Society,
The Gulf War was historically important ⌠because of its timing as a global character, rather than its duration or the number of casualties. The war expunged the idea of a purely peaceful world from the post-Cold war agenda; it demonstrated the weakness of international institutions (the United Nations authorized but did not fight the war) and the enduring dominance of American military power.
Shaw (1991: 207) continues,
It showed the continuing ability to advance Western states to gain the necessary political backing for the use of highly destructive force and the imposition of very heavy casualties on an enemy. At the same time it further exposedâeven if it did not test in the manner of Vietnamâthe vulnerability of societies which have become used to living without the large-scale violence of war, to the intrusion of such violence into everyday life.
Finishing with comments resonant of Baudrillard (1991/1995), Shaw (1991: 207) avers that âthe manipulation of information and opinion, despite its initial successes, confirmed the fragility of the legitimation of this violence in modern statesâ.
If it were not clear that Shaw (1991) was addressing the 1991 Gulf War, these comments could easily be supplanted on the conduct of the Iraq War in 2003 (with the exception of the legal backing from the United Nations) and the recent bombing campaigns across the Middle East in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. For Baudrillard (1991/1995) and Shaw (1991) we learn that the 1991 Gulf War changed the nature and character of war that perhaps set the context for contemporary warfare. This is a form of war being conducted interstate between belligerent nations, to intrastate between warring factions. It lurched the world into states of war justified on essentialist terms and through the manipulation or defection from international mechanisms of justice. Contemporary war offsets the âjustnessâ of conducting technologically sophisticated military violence onto distant nations with no sovereign connection to oneâs own, with the subjugation and denial of human rights (qua Cohen 2001) for the vulnerable civilian populations of supposed âoffendingâ states. War also imposes the threat and conduct of distant war violence on the everyday lives of domestic citizens, creating states of emergency that facilitates the derogation of civil liberties via security policies in ways that would not be acceptable in times without war.
These observations bring us to the undergirding influence for this Handbook. Dating back to a chapter first penned by Ruth Jamieson in 1998, she posed the question, âWhy a criminology of war?â (Jamieson 1998: 480). In answer to that question, we are first informed that
The disinclination of contemporary criminology to foreground war and armed conflict is all the more astonishing when one considers (a) that as an empirical area of study, war offers a dramatic example of mass violence and victimization in extremis; (b) that these issues of violence and violations of human rights are accomplished inter alia through state action-which some would treat as state crime ⌠(c) that they often also involve concerted as well as individual (often gender-specific) human action and collusion-akin in many ways to issues treated in âsubcultural criminologyâ ⌠(d) that war and states of emergency usher in massive increases in social regulation, punishment and ideological control ⌠new techniques of surveillance and, with that, a corresponding derogation of civil rights (Jamieson 1998: 480, emphasis in original).
This definition helps develop ways of conceptualising how war could be approached a...