In this rich and expansive study, Sara Soncini grapples with a timely question: how have theatre practitioners – particularly playwrights – represented and responded to the theatrical challenges of contemporary globalized and highly mediatized warfare? Soncini grounds her investigation in the United Kingdom, and explores war-centric plays which premiered there between 1991 and 2011. Beginning with close readings of a selection of scripts, braiding in observations of their live performances and underpinning the discussion with a theoretical foundation, Soncini weaves together an intricate and insightful analysis of the reshaping of dramatic form that has occurred alongside conceptual shifts in contemporary warfare.

Chapter 1, ‘Mapping the Terrain’, lays out the theoretical framework for the study by exploring the changing parameters of warfare. Soncini uses Mary Kaldor's term, ‘new wars’ – that is, ‘the blurring of the distinctions between war . . . organized crime . . . and large-scale violation of human rights’ (p. 2) – as a starting point and creates a web-like landscape that foregrounds the transforming understanding of war. Paying particular attention to Arjun Appadurai's notion that global terrorism has normalized everyday violence, Michael Ignatieff's observation that the heavy use of technology and media in waging war remove it from everyday life, and Judith Butler's assertion that a life can only be grievable if it is deemed to possess personhood, Soncini draws new and exciting parallels between the making of theatre and the waging of war.

Chapter 2, ‘This Is Not A War’, begins a series of case studies that illuminate how ‘new wars’ have provoked the emergence of new dramaturgical strategies. The case studies in the chapter, including Caryl Churchill's Far Away and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, and Mark Ravenhill's Product, among others, problematize the mimetic representation of twenty-first-century global warfare and emphasize the necessity of the audience's participation in the meaning-making of a production. Chapter 3, ‘“Why Fabulate?”’, examines the resurgence of documentary theatre and its position as a space of interplay between spectators and media-shaped war narratives. The case studies in this chapter are separated into two groups. The first group are plays which exclusively use verbatim source material, including Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry and Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's Guantanamo: Honor-Bound to Defend Freedom. The second group are plays, particularly David Hare's Stuff Happens, that blend together factual occurrences with authorial imagination. Chapter 4, ‘The Performance of Witnessing’, builds upon the previous chapter's conversation of documentary theatre by shifting the focus to a specific type of text that positions the spectator as witness to the event of war and its aftermath. Examples include pieces which dramaturgically situate the audience to bear witness to war, such as Robin Soans's Talking to Terrorists, Mimi Poskitt and Ben Freedman's Yesterday Was a Weird Day: Reflections on July 7th 2005, and other plays that replace replication with witnessing. The final chapter, ‘Figures of Mediation’, brings together plays wherein faulty linguistic mediation between characters and spectators serves as a metaphorical battleground for global conflict. The selection of case studies included in this chapter is vast; George Packer's Betrayed, David Greig's The American Pilot and Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul are among them. Soncini concludes the book with a thorough and much-appreciated appendix that catalogues war-centric plays that premiered in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2011, and provides information including title, playwright, dates and warscape.

Rather than a single, unified explanation, Forms of Conflict offers a multifaceted approach to navigating recent theatrical responses to war. The study is authoritatively argued, far-reaching in its scope, and a welcome contribution to the fields of theatre and performance studies. Furthermore, its interdisciplinary approach yields an impact in several diverse fields including globalization studies, trauma studies and postmodern cultural studies.