Tarak Barkawi
London School of Economics
Tarak Barkawi is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire; his scholarship uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examines the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War. He is currently working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior.
Syllabi
Critical War Studies
War transforms the social and political orders in which we live, just as it obliterates our precious certainties. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the fate of truths offered about war itself. War regularly undermines expectations, strategies and theories, and along with them the credibility of those in public life and the academy presumed to speak with authority about it. This course begins with the recognition that the unsettling character of war has been a profound opportunity for scholarship. For it is precisely in war’s disordering and unsettling of politics and identities that the socially and historically generative powers of war are exposed. In bending, stretching and even breaking institutions and societies, war reveals them to us anew and offers perspectives obscured in times of peace. At the same time, these disruptions shape and inform the course and character of war. This violent but fecund juncture between war, society and politics is what this course seeks to understand.
Much of the study of war is concerned with how to wage it, or how to use it effectively as a policy. Conversely, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have too rarely addressed so unpleasant a topic directly. When they do, they tend to focus on the consequences of war for society, politics and culture, attending only to one dimension of the powerful dialectic between war and the social. Alternatively, war is reduced to an effect of other processes, such as the international balance of power, the world capitalist system, or faulty decision-making and misperception. Elsewhere, there is a pervasive if implicit assumption that war is merely a momentary interruption in peacetime developments and safely can be ignored in analysis of the motive forces of society and politics.
This course places war and society in the same analytic frame. It looks at past and present scholarly efforts to trace the circuits through which war and society shape one another. It conceives war “in the round,” as involving and impacting on all dimensions of social life.