The New Western Way of War

Risk-Transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq

This book analyses the new Western way of warfighting and its future after Iraq. Hitherto leaders have managed campaigns in distant war-zones without disrupting normal social life in Western societies, but the ambitious Global War on Terror and George W. Bush's Iraq adventure have brought about a crisis. Martin Shaw analyses the key 'rules' of new Western war and argues that the USA has increasingly broken them.

Shaw introduces the idea that new Western war is risk-transfer war, centred on minimising life-risks to the military - and hence political and electoral risks to their masters - at the expense not only of 'enemies' but also of those whom the West agrees are 'innocent'. This way of war is morally and politically dubious. Its concealment of its own violence, especially to civilians, opens up a gap between theory and practice. It is unable to compete with the upfront embrace of massacre by its new global enemies. And its attempt to contain risks is fundamentally at odds with the unpredictable nature of war itself. 

This is the first book to anchor the study of Western war in the sociology of risk, and it presents the first systematic account of the contemporary mode of warfare as a whole, showing how Western, terrorist and other ways of warfighting respond to the same media, legal and political conditions of global surveillance war. 

The New Western Way of War is a fundamental contribution to contemporary sociology and international relations, but it is also a moral and political statement. It outlines the stark choice for the West between an increasingly degenerate practice of war and the pursuit of global justice.

Martin Shaw is Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex, and earlier held a chair of sociology at Hull. This book applies the general sociology of war developed in War and Genocide, published by Polity in 2003. See also Martin Shaw's personal site.