War: History and Politics

Entry requirements

Degree and experience
Normally a 2:1 undergraduate degree in a relevant subject. Candidates with a 2:2 or lower or who do not have a degree will still be considered for admission if they can demonstrate suitable professional experience or substantial experience of the subject area.

Interview
You will normally be interviewed so that we can assess your potential to study at masters level.

English language requirements
IELTS 7.0 overall and 6.5 in writing.

International students whose language skills do not match the IELTS scores set out here should consider applying for this course through the Extended Masters programme at the university's Language Institute.

Months of entry

September

Course content

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.