War Studies

Optional courses

Western Intelligence in an Age of Terror - Professor Peter Jackson

This course surveys the way western intelligence agencies (primarily those of Britain and the United States) have dealt with the key security challenges of the early twenty-first century. It will introduce students to a number of concepts central to the study of intelligence and then apply these concepts to the study of intelligence responses to international challenges since the end of the Cold War.

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency, 1800-present - Dr Alex Marshall

This course will introduce students to the key theoretical frameworks behind the phenomena of social mobilization, organised political rebellion, and counter-insurgency from both a purely theoretical and practical perspective, making use of both primary and secondary sources. From the very broadest theoretical outline as to why rebellions and insurgencies occur, the course will then lead students right up to a consideration of present-day dilemmas currently being faced in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American Way of War: From the Revolution to the War on Terror - Dr Phillips O'Brien

This course examines changing American notions of war over time, to both educate the students about the how the power of America has developed, the role it played in many international wars, and how it has accumulated the military that it has today. The course is divided into ten sessions, each dealing with a different aspects and developments of the American military power.

• The American Revolution: The United States as Small Power.
• The American Civil War: Grant, Sherman and the Notion of Total War
• 'Small Wars', Early Wars of American Imperial Power
• The First World War: America on the Verge of World Power
• The Second World War I, The Role American Land/Air Power in the Defeat of Germany
• The Second World War II, Naval and Economic Warfare and the Destruction of Japan
• American Nuclear Doctrine in the Cold War
• Vietnam: The Politics of the use of American Power
• The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Transformation of American Military Power: The First Gulf War and the Former Yugoslavia
• The War on Terror and America as World Military Hegemon 

Chivalry and Warfare in Late Medieval Europe, c. 1300 to c. 1500 - Professor Matthew Strickland

This course aims to explore the nature of chivalry in aristocratic culture and in particular in relation to the conduct of warfare in theory and in practice. This module will examine key aspects of the debate surrounding the idea that, by the fifteenth century, concepts of chivalry had become ossified and anachronistic. It shall explore the role played by the 'law of arms' in later medieval chivalry, and examine the operation of conventions of ransom and the profits of war which were a key incentive in the prosecution of war. The ambiguous relationship between notions of chivalry and the impact of war on the population at large will also be examined.

Sessions will include the following topics:

• Huizinga, Keen and the Scope of the Debate
• The Knight Redundant? (i) The Man-at-Arms and the 'Infantry Revolution'
• The Knight Redundant? (ii) Artillery and the Rise of Firearms
• Laws of Siege and Rituals of Capitulation
• Prisoners, Ransom and the Courts of Chivalry
• Chivalry, War and the Non-Combatant
• Captains and Condottieri: War as a Profession
• Crusading: A Noble Anachronism?
• The Secular Orders of Knighthood
• Jousts of Peace, Jousts of War: The Tournament and late Medieval Chivalry