Book review: Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate, A Criminology of War?
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620920126 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Author | Emma Milne |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
920126TCR0010.1177/1362480620920126Theoretical CriminologyBook review
book-review2020
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 1 –3
Book review
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620920126
DOI: 10.1177/1362480620920126
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate, A Criminology of War?, Bristol University Press: Bristol,
2019; 176 pp.: 9781529202595, £60 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Emma Milne, University of Plymouth, UK
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 ongo-
ing 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...
To continue reading
Request your trial