Abstract

This paper offers a critical appraisal and overview of criminology's recent engagement with the myriad discursive, material and experiential dimensions of the war/crime/political violence relationship and argues that a number of emerging criminologies have the capacity to advance our understanding of the nexus between contemporary war/political violence and crime. It suggests that recent criminological scholarship on the discursive and practical aspects of war/political violence (for example, cultural criminology on genocide and suffering, on the war on terror, and other work on State crime, biopolitics, security, corruption, development, gender violence) together have the potential to take the study of war, crime and international justice beyond the entrenched legalism of contemporary international criminal justice and human rights scholarship that presumes to exhaust these questions (Agamben, 2002). The paper concludes by reiterating the necessity of getting beyond anachronistic conceptions of States, sovereignties and internationality and engaging in analyses of the war/crime/justice nexus with both passion (Morrison, 2006) and humility (McEvoy, 2007).