six - The ‘Dialectics of War’ in Criminology

Summary

Introduction

In the Introduction it was noted that the work of Clausewitz ([1832]1997) depicted war in rationalist terms as a violent entitlement of the state, to be used without limit against an ‘enemy’ for political ends. However, in what has followed Kaldor's (2014) interpretation of this as an old mode of warfare has been reinterpreted to illustrate that throughout the 20th and 21st centuries war can be understood as a dynamic social phenomenon which has changed into new forms. Importantly, from the Second World War onwards, these ‘new’ wars disproportionately targeted non-combatant civilian populations during the ‘war on terrorism’ (Chapter Three), via atrocity and genocide (Chapter Four), during the production, use and proliferation of nuclear weapons (Chapter Five); and, as we will come to learn (in Chapter Seven) through the perpetration of sexual and gender-based violence. In this chapter, we shall problematise further the disproportionate targeting of civilians by concentrating on their continued victimisation through aerial terror bombing. As Ruggiero (2015: 33) points out:

Estimates suggest that, throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the American civil war, 90 per cent of losses were among fighting troops. In World War I (WWI) deaths of civilians still accounted for 10–15 per cent, becoming around 40 per cent in World War II (WWII).

Contemporarily, civilians are now estimated to total some ninety per cent of all war deaths (Ruggiero, 2015). Indeed, as Steinert (2003: 276) further suggests, the asymmetry of this victimisation meant that ‘from the Second World War on, it became safer to be a soldier than a civilian’ during war. By exposing this dilemma to sociological analysis, here we argue that the social phenomenon of war comes to form multiple dialogues within civic and intellectual life. Drawing on further work of Martin Shaw (1988a), we outline two interconnected ‘dialectics of war’ within criminology: first between civilian war victims and the ‘deviant’ soldier; second between what we have termed the politics of remembering and ‘forgetting’ war violence. The purposes of examining these two interconnected dialectics are to illustrate that the ‘risk-transfer’ wars of the 20th and 21st centuries (Shaw, 2005) have come strategically to prioritise the lives of soldiers over the deaths of civilians, and that war making is a relational process.