Introduction

In a 2003 special issue of Theoretical Criminology, Ruth Jamieson assembled a collection of essays which variously addressed war and human rights. Their purpose was to highlight, as Kaldor (2014) also suggests, ‘new’ wars are often ‘internal civil conflicts’ that emphasise the ‘local expression of global processes, politics and sentiments’ (Jamieson, 2003: 259). Jamieson concluded these essays had ‘necessarily produced omissions’, which most obviously included

While we go on to deal with many of these issues in later chapters, in this chapter we wish to draw attention to the ‘omissions’ noted above, which we instead interpret as key focal points for the contemporary criminological study of war. The chapter begins by suggesting that in the aftermath of 9/11 the ‘war on terrorism’ became the main interest of criminological studies related to war. Here this is understood as conceptualising war in metaphorical terms reflecting two emergent agendas. First, we outline a ‘crime/security nexus’ illustrated by studies taking counterterrorism and matters of ‘security’ as their main concern post-9/11 in order to address the (internal/domestic) consequences of the ‘war on terror’. Second, we outline examples from the literature addressing the (external/global) consequences of the ‘war on terrorism’ as a ‘war/crime nexus’ (Jamieson, 1998); identified at macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. In presenting these two prongs of the literature, we argue that the post-9/11 era can be understood as a period of increased activity within criminology that overwhelmingly interwove a ‘renewal of interest’ (Jamieson, 2003: 262) between matters of war, crime and security, under the auspices of the ‘war on terrorism’. We conclude, this agenda provides the foundation for the critique of, and departure from, criminological engagement with war found in the remainder of this book: that is, following 9/11 the contemporary meaning of a ‘criminology of war’ became tantamount to the ‘war on terrorism’.