Abstract
Can there be a criminology of war? This is the focus of interrogation for Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate, in their book, A Criminology of War?. To address the question the authors provide a detailed and critical interrogation of criminological approaches to the study of war and war-related activities. In so doing they acknowledge that the study of war is long-standing and interdisciplinary, with their intention ‘to keep criminological scholars mindful that war is a conceptually, historically, temporally and spatially dynamic [. . .] a complex and changing social phenomenon with a considerable history and ongoing relevance’ (p. 13).
The contribution of the book to the study of war in the discipline of criminology is the systematic and sophisticated interrogation, unpacking and critiquing of prior mainstream criminological engagement. In this respect McGarry and Walklate succeed in their desire to ‘disrupt the solidarity and assuredness of knowledge which has fast accumulated under the rubric of a “criminology of war” in the post-9/11 era’ (p. 13). In so doing, the authors argue four key points. First, that contemporary attempts to imagine a criminology of war have ‘often been fixed in time [. . .] to refer to the post 9/11 context’ (p. 59) and so become synonymous with the ‘war on terrorism’. The result is that events prior to 9/11 have largely been forgotten within criminological analysis. Consequently, the study of war has been conceptualized as a recent endeavour, which is not the case. A further impact of mainstream scholarly engagement is that civilian victimization as a result of war has taken a ‘less prominent focus’ in critical assessments. This leads to the authors’ second key argument, which is that the consequences of war fall disproportionally on civilians, and in contemporary wars upon civilians in the global South. To explore this point McGarry and Walklate examine genocide and nuclear warfare. The third key argument presented is that forms of warfare such as ‘terror bombing’ need to be conceptualized as more than simply ‘state crime’. Instead, such campaigns of violence, classified as ‘war’, need to be seen as a form of ‘risk transfer’, with the lives of military personnel being prioritized over the deaths of civilians. This is especially the case for wars orchestrated by nations in the global North which are fought in the global South, ‘wherein political risks are weighed against “life risks” in which the lives of civilians killed at war come to matter less in terms of their (high) expendability, (low) visibility and lack of sentiment to the public’ (pp. 113–114). In contrast, the conceptualization of ‘soldier as victim’ has allowed for further obscuration of civilian victims.
The final, and most significant, contribution of this text to the criminological scholarship on war is a critical assessment of the study of war from a feminist and gendered perspective; with the authors highlighting that the study of war within criminology has frequently overlooked the ‘inherently gendered masculine nature’ or war (p. 12). This argument, presented in Chapter 7, is built upon the critical engagement of previous criminological studies provided in previous chapters. Within their analysis, the authors foreground victimology and feminism. Significantly, McGarry and Walklate make the link between war-time, peace-time and post-conflict gendered relationships that underpin patterns of gendered-based violence, and so see violence in war, specifically sexual violence, as having continuity in the domestic context and in the setting of war and genocide (p. 134). In drawing on the notion of violence on a ‘continuum’ (Kelly, 1988) or across ‘continua’ (Cockburn, 2012), McGarry and Walklate challenge the idea that domestic violence, war and genocide violence are ‘separate and separable, particularly when viewed from the perspective of the harm generated by them’ (p. 139). But more than this, the authors argue that to conceptualize war as an inherently gendered set of activities ‘renders its violence(s) profoundly normal, routine, and consequently a habitual concern for these disciplines’ (p. 143). Such disciplinary analysis is often limited by ‘[t]he hold of positivism projects North American (liberal) values—particularly those centring individualism—on criminology across the globe’ (p. 143). As such, the authors highlight that it is liberal criminology that has dominated the discipline, and so shaped what areas of investigation are deemed legitimate or illegitimate. Both criminology and victimology have been preoccupied with the individual as the main cause of violence, thus obscuring the gendered nature of violence in war and genocide, and the connections with violence in other contexts.
McGarry and Walklate’s critique of mainstream criminological approaches to the analysis of war illustrates the key contribution of this book for criminological theory—the need to place gender analysis at the centre of criminological conceptualization and theorization. In using a gendered lens of analysis, and so revealing the continuum between domestic and wartime violence and harm, McGarry and Walklate illustrate the failings of ‘the dominant individualistic orientation of mainstream criminology and/or victimology’ (p. 139). A lesson that can be taken away from this book for all criminologists, studying all areas of crime, deviance, victimization and criminal justice, is the need to centralize gender, and arguably feminist, analysis. No longer can a gendered approach be pushed to the margins of criminology, for, as McGarry and Walklate illustrate, the result is for key understandings of social phenomenon to be missed or hidden from analysis.
One potential challenge of the book is highlighted by the authors themselves, that in presenting the chapters as they have the book is either ‘a roaming discussion of some breadth and limited depth’, or ‘a series of targeted discussions with some depth but limited reach’ (p. 165). While certain chapters are incredibly dense with discussion of previous research, the authors navigate complex debates with care and constant signposting to their core arguments. To truly grasp the crux of their theoretical position it is necessary to read the book sequentially.
Overall, this is an excellent text that will be of interest to scholars who research beyond war and genocide, due to the sophisticated unpacking of mainstream criminological theory and debates. The discipline needs more work like that of McGarry and Walklate’s, with analysis centring gender to uncover ‘patriarchal social relations and dominant forms of masculinity [that] are produced and reproduced’ at all levels of society (individual, institutional, state and global) (p. 143).