New book - forthcoming from Polity, 2005

Martin Shaw 

The New Western Way of War

Risk-Transfer War and Militarism after Iraq

This book attempts to understand the 2003 Iraq War as a case of the 'new Western way of war'. It starts from the conundrum of the apparently successful US campaign in Iraq that is nevertheless mired in continuing, politically damaging violence, and it asks how should we understand and evaluate this? In order to answer this question, the book explores the idea of a 'new Western way of war'. First it briefly outlines the history of Western wars since the 1980s, how these wars differ from historic campaigns, and how they have been framed politically as 'humanitarian' and 'anti-terrorist'.

The book then examines critically how a 'new Western way of war' has been theorised in strategic thought (centring on the idea of 'the revolution in military affairs') and in more critical, sociologically oriented writing (e.g. Mann, Kaldor, Ignatieff, der Derian). It deepens the discussion by asking what do we mean by a 'way of warfare' and how this might be related to more sociological concepts of warfare as a 'mode' or 'cluster' of social action and institutions, related to other forms of social action and organisation in the structure of modern society. It will be argued that, whereas in earlier phases of modern warfare, war overrode other social dynamics and its own criteria of success were self-sufficient, in later-modern, global-era Western wars the 'way of warfare' is much more effectively subordinate to criteria of success generated in other institutional fields, especially electoral politics. This is because Western societies are 'post-military' in the sense of transcending the historic, total-war modes of militarisation. Hence we can only understand the contemporary Western way of war in terms of its interfaces with politics, economics, media, etc.  

But war involves, for all this, a very specific kind of political project and social action. How can we understand the links of this project to its constraining political and social environment? The book proposes that the answer centres on the relationships of different kinds of risk. Before I take this argument further in a concrete analysis of the new Western warfare and Iraq, I therefore survey briefly how the concept of risk figures in both strategic thought (notably in Clausewitz) and in recent sociology (Giddens, Beck et al.). I use insights derived from bringing together these different approaches, together with the analysis from the earlier chapters, to generate a distinctive concept of the new Western way of war as 'risk-transfer war'.

In the pivotal chapter 4, I argue that a contemporary Western war constitutes an imagined 'risk-economy', centred on the crystallisation of imagined military, global and life-risks into political risk-taking that defines the project. But qua war, this political risk-taking involves exposing Western soldiers, enemy combatants and civilians to real life-risks; this risk-exposure therefore translates into risk-experience (loss of life, injury and other harm) that feeds back, primarily via media coverage, into the calculus of political risk. (Other actors, both military and political, influence the risk-economy at all stages.) I shall then argue that contemporary Western warfare can best be understand in terms of transfers of risk - from imagined risks to a concrete risk-project, from political risk to life-risks, between various kinds of life-risk (e.g. protecting soldiers vs. exposing civilians), and from risk-experience back (via media) to the underlying political project. This chapter will contain a summary of the main features of risk-transfer war and their relationships.

This concept established, Chapters 5 and 6 examine the Iraq War in detail as a particular risk economy. They argue that the imagined risk economy of the war contained a particular flaw, the phoney character of the risks of Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction', that from the start made the war a particularly risky political project for the Bush administration (and even more for the Blair government as its junior partner). I shall pursue arguments that the Iraq War also involved greater risks for civilians because of the strategic emphasis on regime change and the centrality of Baghdad to the war. Examining the exposure of enemies, soldiers and civilians to manifold life-risks, I shall argue that all of these were extensive and made the underlying project highly problematic.

However I shall ask whether the focus of opponents and of some critical social science projects on 'body-counting' (chiefly estimating total numbers of civilian deaths) really makes an effective case about the risk-experience of Iraqis. I shall argue that insofar as civilian deaths make a difference to the outcome of the war, how individual incidents are represented may be more significant than overall totals. And I shall explore the politically crucial tensions around incidents involving US and other coalition casualties. I shall conclude by examining the extent of political blowback and what the contradictions of the war tell us about the continuing viability of this mode of war.  

In conclusion, I shall address the future of the 'new Western way of war', whether it resolves the historic problem of degeneracy in war, the legitimate scope of military power in contemporary conditions, and the alternatives to war and militarism today.