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main ideas and online papers |
a guide to work by Martin Shaw on war
Books, articles and chapters, many online, grouped around the main concepts I have developed:
I have argued that war in the global era is a 'degenerate' form of total war, in which counterrevolution and genocide have become more prominent, and it raises disturbing questions about Western warfare. See
The contemporary mode of warfare? Mary Kaldor's theory of new wars (2000)
War and globality: the role and character of war in the global transition (1999)
The Kosovan War (1999)
New wars of the city (English text of 'Nueva Guerras Urbanas', 1997)
My work in the 1980s argued that in the twentieth century, the 'mode of warfare' came to dominate society, so that the contradictions of war became central contradictions of modern society. It is a critical position in both social theory and historiography. See
The rise and fall of the military-democratic state (1987)
Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace BOOK (1988)
War and the nation-state (on Giddens, 1989)
From total war to democratic peace (on E.P.Thompson, 1991)
I argued in the final chapter of Dialectics of War (1988) that the viability of war as a 'continuation of politics by other means' is increasingly outmoded, not only because nuclear war would be self-defeating, but because the progressive role of 'armed struggle' is largely played out. This theme has been continued in my work on the degenerate and genocidal character of the wars of the 1990s.
I visited The new politics of war in chapter 6 of Global Society and International Relations (1994), and returned to the argument in Risk-transfer militarism, small massacres and the legitimacy of war (2002).
I emphasize the contradictory and rapidly changing roles of mass media in war, notably in my studies of the Gulf War and the Kurdish refugee crisis. See
From managed media to active representation: the Gulf War and the Kurdish refugee crisis, Part III of Civil Society and Media in Global Crises BOOK 1996)
Crystallisations of Media in the Global Revolution: News Coverage and Power from Kurdistan to Kosova (2000)
Global voices: civil society and media in global crises (1999)
I argue that society, especially in the West, has moved beyond classical total-war militarism. See
Post-Military Society (book, 1991)
Theses on a post-military Europe (1994)
6. Risk-transfer war/militarism
Risk-transfer militarism, small massacres and the legitimacy of war (2002)
The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq Cambridge: Polity BOOK (2005)