PGDip MA War: History And Politics

This MA offers an alternative, critical and global perspective to war studies.

Instead of focusing on the usual themes of military history and conflict studies, our War: History and Politics MA is an interdisciplinary degree which examines the causes, modes, experience and memory of war through a combination of theories from critical history, politics, philosophy and cultural theory.

Adopting a critical stance against war-making, you will cover a variety of topics that are usually ignored in war-studies. You will learn about those dominant forces that take societies to war, but you will also study about resistance movements and anti-war activism. You will learn about how war has been conceptualised and ‘normalised’, and how you can critique these narratives.

This degree has a global outlook. Our case studies are drawn from across the world, from the start of the twentieth century to today. Yugoslavia, Colombia, Palestine, Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Guantanamo Bay are some of the areas covered by the curriculum, along with more familiar histories from the two World Wars and the Cold War.