Book excerpt: With the academic study of ‘war’ gaining renewed popularity within criminology in recent years, this book illustrates the long-standing engagement with this social phenomenon within the discipline. Foregrounding established criminological work addressing war and connecting it to a wide range of extant sociological literature, the authors present and further develop theoretical and conceptual ways of thinking critically about war. Within this book, whilst providing an implicit critique of mainstream criminology the authors seek to question if a ‘criminology of war’ is possible, and if so how this seemingly ‘new horizon’ of the discipline might be usefully informed by sociology.