Introduction

Abstract

It has been customary, among the relatively small band of sociologists who have started to write about war and peace, to open almost any article by bemoaning the absence of these issues in our discipline. When the British Sociological Association decided to hold its 1985 Conference on the theme, ‘War, Violence and Social Change’, there was some doubt as to whether the volume of ongoing work — in a field which hardly existed in British sociology before the present decade — was sufficient to justify devoting a major national event to it. One contributor, who has since published an expanded version of his paper elsewhere, took up the familiar refrain of sociology’s ‘neglect and betrayal’ in its treatment of violence and war (Marsland, 1985). And yet, while the Conference certainly called forth important work on other forms of social violence — particularly, as will be seen from the companion volume edited by Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard, on Gender and Violence — it also proved a landmark in the reinstatement of the central issues of war and peace in British sociology. This book will show, we hope, the vitality of the discipline, and something of the range of work being produced by both established writers and younger researchers. With this volume, it should be possible to end the complaint of neglect, and to begin to mark out the substantive areas of concern to which the ‘sociology of war and peace’ is devoting itself.