PROF GREG KENNEDY Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment, Vintage, London, 2017. Varoufakis’ tale of political failure, moral victory and individual weakness is a modern day tale of strategic thought and planning that speaks to the very core of many of the themes raised in various courses here at… Read More DSD Summer Reading #2
This is the first in a series of short posts in which members of the Defence Studies Department share what they have been/will be reading this summer. We hope that you’ll be inspired to pick some of the titles up for yourself! DR KEN PAYNE My next writing project is about sex and statecraft, so… Read More DSD Summer Reading 2018 #1
RICHARD NED LEBOW is Professor of International Political Theory in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London (part-time) and James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is also a Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has taught strategy at the National and Naval War Colleges and served as a… Read More Avoiding War, Making Peace
PROF ANTHONY KING Professor Anthony King specialises in the study of the war and the armed forces and is particularly interested in the question of small unit cohesion. His most recent publications include The Combat Soldier: infantry tactics and cohesion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Oxford, 2013) and (ed.) Frontline: combat and cohesion in… Read More THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GENERAL: FROM INDIVIDUAL TO COLLECTIVE COMMAND
ANDREW HARRIS April saw the inaugural History of War Conference organised in partnership by King’s College London and the University of Oxford. The event was organised for PhD students from both institutions, sponsored by the Sir Michael Howard Centre and held at KCL’s Strand campus. The programme consisted of a set of small panel discussions,… Read More Conference Report of inaugural Sir Michael Howard Centre Joint KCL/Oxford PhD Conference, 23 April 2018
JEREMY BLACK Prof. Jeremy Black studied at studied at Queens’ College Cambridge, St John’s College Oxford, and Merton College Oxford before joining the University of Durham as a lecturer in 1980. There he gained his PhD and ultimately his professorship in 1994. He joined Exeter University as Established Chair in History in 1996, and is currently a… Read More What is War?
A.G. HOPKINS Tony Hopkins is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History in the University of Cambridge, Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, and Emeritus Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History in the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Stirling and Birmingham, and… Read More AMERICAN EMPIRE: REALITIES AND UNCERTAINTIES
RORY CORMAC Rory Cormac is an associate professor of international Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (OUP, 2018). You an follow him at @RoryCormac. Unacknowledged interference in the affairs of other states is all around us.… Read More A British “Way” in Covert Action
DR KEN PAYNE I’m writing a new book, provisionally titled Sex and Statecraft.My research question: is there something particularly ‘male’ about modern international politics—especially in matters of war and diplomacy? I think there is, and that we can profitably learn something about it from evolutionary psychology, especially from theories of sexual selection. Why are most… Read More Sex and the Statesman
MATT LEWIS What is violence? An instrumental means to an end? Or the end itself? Is violence the visceral embodiment of a long held grievance, rather than a tool to change the aggrieving behaviour? Earlier this month, Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’ presented a gut-wrenching visualisation of randomised and anonymised violence in urban America: one… Read More Channelling Fanon: What Childish Gambino tells us about Violence and Urban Space
Defence-In-Depth 