Martin Shaw

• University of Sussex

The first academic history of the antinuclear movement in Britain to be published in the 21st Century. This overview from the 1950s to the 1920s includes both mass movement phases (late 1950s/early 1960s and 1980s) as well as the period between and the campaign over the last few decades. As well as CND, the book covers the Direct Action Committee A...

A full account of the role of racism in Brexit, from its origins to the referendum and the subsequent conflict over it and its effects on the Tory regime, underpinned by a framework for understanding the specificity of political racism.

i>Political Racism conceptualizes a distinctive form of racism - intentional, organized hostility mobilized by political actors - and examines its role in the Brexit conflict and in the rise of a new nationalist politics in the UK. In a compelling analysis the book argues that Powellite anti-immigrant racism, reinterpreted in numerical terms, was...

Shaw’s paper examines Eric Kaufmann’s idea of ‘racial self-interest’—which references Max Weber’s types of rationality in order to support ‘cordoning off’ racism from broader anti-immigration attitudes—through an analysis of Brexit, Kaufmann’s principal case. It discusses how Weber’s ideas might help us identify ‘absolute’ and ‘instrumental’ types...

Review of Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics , Cambridge University Press, 2020.

This article considers genocide as a general type of political violence and violent conflict, together with its relationships to the larger fields of political and armed conflict, especially war. The article deals first with the conceptual delimitation of these terms and then with the analytical issues involved in their relationships in different h...

This paper provides a basis for re-examining the contemporary connections of antisemitism and racism through an examination of the conceptual and theoretical parameters of the concept of racism. It argues that racism is a broad and dynamic category, the forms of which must be seen as varied and constantly changing. Thus although ‘new antisemitism’...

This paper argues, contrary to the focus on ‘new’ and civil wars in the current literature, that the Second World War remains the main historical reference point for understandings of contemporary warfare and, relatedly, the international system in the twenty-first century. Despite huge further changes in the last 70 years, the war was the culminat...

This commentary reviews the responses to an earlier article, 'Palestine in an International Historical Perspective on Genocide' (Holy Land Studies, 9:1, 1-25), arguing that they illustrate both the possibilities and the limitations of serious debate about these issues. The responses mostly neglected the analytical core of the argument relating to 1...

Genocide and International Relations' lays the foundations for a new perspective on genocide in the modern world. Genocide studies have been influenced, negatively as well as positively, by the political and cultural context in which the field has developed. In particular, a narrow vision of comparative studies has been influential in which genocid...

The ethical and political commitments that underlie scholarship on the prevention of genocide are more obvious than in other fields. Indeed, the concept of genocide was invented as part of Raphael Lemkin’s ambitious project (1933 and 1944) to criminalise a general class of destructive actions against population groups. Since Lemkin’s campaign was e...

Genocide is widely seen as a phenomenon of domestic politics, which becomes of international significance because it offends against international law. Hence there are as yet inadequate International Relations analyses of the production of genocide. This article challenges the idea of the domestic genesis of genocide, and critiques the correspondin...

This article (originally given as the Annual War Studies Lecture at King's College, London, on 25 January 2010) challenges the assumption that Britain's relationship to genocide is constituted by its ‘vigilance’ towards the genocide of others. Through a critical overview of the question of genocide in the historical and contemporary politics of the...

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This article discusses what may be involved in treating the 1948 destruction of a large part of Arab society in Palestine as 'genocide'. It argues that genocide is a general sociological concept which can be applied to many historical cases varying in scale, murderousness, ideological motivation, etc., so applying genocide analysis does not imply a...

The possibility of violence is ubiquitous in human social relations, its forms are manifold and its causes complex. Different types of violence are interrelated but in complex ways, and they are studied within a wide range of disciplines, so that a general theory, while possible, is difficult to achieve. This paper acknowledges that violence can ne...

Martin Shaw was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1947, graduated in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968, and later gained his PhD in the Sociology of International Relations and War from the University of Hull. He was a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Durham (1970–72), and then Lecturer, Senior Lectu...

This article argues that it is erroneous to counterpose globalization to the state, as many increasingly sterile debates in the social sciences have done. Globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation of state forms: it is both predicated on and produces such transformations. The reason for the false counterposition of...

IntroductionWar and the City: Historical PerspectivesThe Guerrilla Threat to the CityAnti-Urbanism in the New WarsViolence Against the PeasantryUrbicide in ContextWar, Genocide, and Their Many “Cides”Conclusion

Colin Gray's ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general. Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before ‘9/11’ brought it to an abrupt end. The Balkans...

The perception of initial success in the `war against terrorism' appears to strengthen a general relegitimation of war in Western society that has been gathering pace over the last two decades. This article considers the war in Afghanistan as the latest example of the new Western way of war, and analyses its casualties compared with previous campai...

Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey highlight an emerging consensus that `empire' is a neglected category of International Relations (IR), indeed of the social sciences. However, while the two authors are largely correct in their critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, this paper identifies limitations in their own argument. It develops a b...

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizen...

This paper argues that the traditions of the social sciences are struggling to understand global change. It offers a critique of attempts to bring historical sociology into international relations, which has resulted in the import of a tradition that has been focused on earlier modern transformations, and underestimates global change. At the same t...

This ambitious study, first published in 2000, rewrites the terms of debate about globalization. Martin Shaw argues that the deepest meaning of globality is the growing sense of worldwide human commonality as a practical social force, arising from political struggle not technological change. The book focuses upon two new concepts: the unfinished gl...

This paper outlines an analysis of the Kosovan war of 1998-99 in the light of historical-sociological perspectives on the contemporary state and on war and genocide. It argues that Kosova poses new challenges which threaten to relegitimate war as a means of politics, after the earlier implication of total war with genocide, unless alternative forms...

John Hobson's article presents us with a paradox. He upbraids international relations for not catching up with the second wave of historical sociology. But in order to remedy international relations' failure to understand state-society relations, he advocates a historical sociology which is rooted in the same old international, pre-global categorie...

A book of essay which examines the globalisation of social relations and its implications for conceptions of society, state, politics, international relations and international security. Includes chapters critiquing sociologists such as Giddens and IR theorists such as Booth and Buzan.

This article offers a sociological perspective on a major conceptual issue in international relations, the question of ‘security’, and it raises major issues to do with the role of sociological concepts in international studies. For some years now, the work of sociological writers such as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann1 has attracted some interest in in...

Preparations for each new war are based on the last comparable previous conflict. For the United States, ‘Vietnam was the critical benchmark in preparing for the Gulf. For Britain, the Gulf was compared with the Falklands—the lack of political debate and the agenda for media control both reflected the 1982 crisis. The Labour opposition was afraid o...

It is argued that the discussions of the concept of strategy in papers by Crow (1989) and Morgan (1989) ignore the military origins of strategic thinking, and that more attention needs to be given to its diffusion from military to general social usage, as well as to specifically sociological uses. The paper then outlines a critique of strategic stu...

A critique of strategic and sociological thought on war, leading to an outline historical-sociological account of the dynamics of total war from the C19 industrialisation of war to the First and Second World Wars and the nuclear arms race. The book, first published by Pluto Press in 1988, argues that in the first half of the twentieth century the m...

The year 1985 saw the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War: in May, the accent was on victory in Europe, but by August, the festive atmosphere had soured as it was Hiroshima’s turn. In Britain, the event was officially celebrated as marking four decades of ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’, under a Prime Minister who cl...

In the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, sociology developed from a marginal discipline limited to a handful of British universities to a core social-science subject established in virtually all centres of further and higher education. In the same decade, however, it was widely believed that sociology was ‘in crisis’. The crisis was not m...

Politics is of the essence of Marxism: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’. However much Marxist economic and social theory may become divorced from its practical function, as in academia they often have, Marxist political theory must by definition embody it. And yet there has often been something rather pa...

We have lived through a transition at the beginning of the 1980s which has all the signs of being more fundamental than any since 1945. The start of the new decade coincided almost exactly with the Western decisions about theatre nuclear weapons and the Soviet action in Afghanistan. 1980–81, unlike previous crises in a twelve year cycle which goes...

The experience of war in our Northern industrial civilisation is a strange phenomenon. After two world wars, the nature and effects of which were unprecedented in human history, we have lived through nearly four decades without global conflict. This period, usually described as one of peace, has been overhung by the fear of warfare of unimaginable...

It is commonplace to observe that while Marx saw the withering away of the state as necessary for communism, the state in ‘Communist’ societies has done anything but wither away. This seems to indicate a paradox in the Marxian theory, whose resolution would probably tend to undermine the theory itself. It is, however, argued that the expansion of t...

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