Introduction

In this book we have endeavoured to connect extant sociological and criminological literature to the contested subject of ‘war’. By foregrounding what for some might be regarded as ‘subjugated knowledge’ (Foucault, 2004), we have attempted to demonstrate in preliminary ways how criminological literature addressing war might be revisited and developed from additional sociological insights. In Chapters Two to Seven we demonstrated that there have been some meaningful criminological contributions on ‘old’ and ‘new’ wars (Kaldor, 2014), including the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust, the Cold War era, further genocides throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the Balkans wars, the conflict in Northern Ireland and most recently wars perpetrated under the lexicon of the ‘war on terrorism’ post-9/11. What we hope to have made clear is that the study of war is not new to criminology (or sociology). We also hope to have illuminated some of the ‘negative evidence’ (Lewis and Lewis, 1980) inherent in the literature we have presented. In so doing it becomes apparent that not all wars, armed conflicts and genocides have caught the attention of the discipline. For example, the Falklands War stands out for its near complete absence. Moreover, with few notable exceptions, other wars and conflicts – including the 1991 Gulf War (see White, R., 2008) and Israel's ‘colonial-territorial project’ of occupied East Jerusalem in the West Bank of historic Palestine against Palestinian land (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2017: 1280) – have been significantly underrepresented within criminological scholarship on war. Furthermore, with the exception of recent substantive work documenting genocidal violence across some African nations, and parts of South and Southeast Asia (noted in Chapter Four), so the (in) visibility of war and conflict occurring in other parts of the Global South (and North for that matter) become noticeable by their lack of coverage in much of the conventional literature. By implication these absences are suggestive of both the normative disciplinary interests of (mainstream) criminology and the orientation of its metropolitan knowledge base, a point to which we shall return.

In this extended conclusion we wish to underscore that there is more work to do to ensure criminological scholarship has something relevant and critical to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of war.