War: History and Politics

The War: History and Politics MA is an interdisciplinary programme that focuses exclusively on modern history, examining all major wars of the twentieth and twenty-first century from a historical and political perspective.

It covers a wide spectrum of case studies from the personal and local to the national and the transnational, offering you:

• critical engagement with the current academic debates in British and international history and politics as to the causes, forms, legacies and memory of modern wars
• specialised study of all major conflicts in the last hundred years, from the two World Wars, Cold War and anticolonial resistance movements to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and War on Terror
• skills and closely supervised training in researching and writing about the forms and legacies of modern wars, using primary sources, and engaging with current scholar arguments, analytical models and methodological tools
• the ability to relate your knowledge and make relevant contributions to the public debates on war today
• the chance to go on two field trips – one in the UK and the other in mainland Europe.

You will answer questions such as: What causes wars? How have soldiers and civilians experienced modern, total warfare? What traces do wars leave and how has our world of today been shaped by the wars of the recent past? And what about all those soldiers, armies, battles, defeats, compromises and atrocities that remain ‘forgotten’?