Martin Shaw (sociologist)

Martin Shaw (born 30 June 1947 in Driffield, Yorkshire) is a British sociologist and academic. He is a research professor of international relations at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals and Sussex University and a Professorial Fellow in International Relations and Human Rights at Roehampton University. He is best known for his sociological work on war, genocide and global politics.

Educated at Catholic grammar schools in Northern England (his father Roy Shaw and mother had converted to Catholicism), Shaw studied Sociology at the London School of Economics, graduating in 1968. He was a member of the editorial board of the Catholic left-wing journal, Slant (1965–67), for which his first articles were written, but left the Catholic Church in 1967.

In his Marxist period in the 1970s, Shaw published Marxism versus Sociology: A Guide to Reading and Marxism and Social Science: The Roots of Social Science. However he developed a critique of Marxism, which he saw as incapable of fully analysing the problem of war, as he argued in Socialism and Militarism. He pioneered a new sociology of war and militarism, in his edited volume, War, State and Society and in Dialectics of War. In the 1990s he published two studies in this area: Post-Military Society and Civil Society and Media in Global Crises, a study of British responses to the 1991 Gulf War.

Shaw also entered debates in International Relations, with his co-edited book State and Society in International Relations (1991) and his books Global Society and International Relations and Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution. He founded The Global Site (2000), a portal for critical writing on global politics, culture and society, which also became a significant forum for academic debate after 9/11.

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