Introduction

So far this book has been preoccupied with the fixations of extant criminological studies of war and their relative strengths and weaknesses in making sense of war and its consequences. In this penultimate chapter, we take a noticeably different view of how war has been generally studied within criminology (and sociology). By drawing out some key themes relating to the violence(s) of war more broadly understood throughout the literature covered so far, in this chapter we foreground two perspectives that have been understated up to this point: on the one hand, victimology (aspects of which have been discussed elsewhere in this book), and on the other hand, feminism. In so doing, and following Barberet (2014), this chapter focuses attention on interconnections between war-time, peace-time and post-conflict contexts in the experience of war and its violence(s). The substantive topics of concern in exploring such interconnections are twofold: the repositioning of war as a gendered activity predicated on hegemonic forms of masculinity and masculine posturing; and the nature and extent of sexual violence(s) and their varying expression across the domains of war, peace and post-conflict when understood as gendered crimes. These, we believe, offer a corrective to how the normalcy of war violence has been assumed and understood so far in our discussions in this book. However, in the interests of providing a coherent and focussed illustration of this reconceptualisation of war our example in this chapter draws primarily from the nature and impact of genocide.

As will become evident, drawing clear boundaries between some aspects of the issues addressed here is highly contentious and they are drawn as a heuristic device only. This is to help illustrate how war violence is normatively considered in criminological and sociological literature more generally, and as a means by which to be critically reflective on what has been presented throughout the previous chapters. Moreover, as earlier chapters have been concerned to demonstrate, it is the case that there have always been criminologists and, for the purposes of this chapter, victimologists and feminists, concerned with the practices and consequences of war. To begin our discussion, we first return to reconsider genocidal violence (discussed in Chapter Four), this time from the view of victimology.