History of Global Arms Transfer, 4 (2017), pp. 17-24

The Development of War Studies at King’s
College London
By JOSEPH A. MAIOLO*
This article surveys the origins and development of War Studies at King’s College
London from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries the growth of military studies at King’s wassporadic, the two world wars, the Cold War and post-cold war conflicts drove therapid expansion of War Studies. This article describes how the department haschanged from one focused on military history and strategic studies to one thattackles a range of contemporary security issues from many analytical perspectives
and methodological approaches. It concludes with some personal observations
about the challenges faced by the Department of War Studies as a scholarly
community and as a collective research effort.
King’s College London is unique among leading research universities in hosting theworld’s largest faculty devoted to the study of war. There are of course other prestigious
institutions that host big departments of international relations and global affairs, but whatmakes War Studies King’s distinct is that the inter-disciplinary study of war is the defining
purpose. The development of War Studies is the topic of this paper. My goal is to provide
readers with an overview of how the college obtained its standing in the field. That history
reflects the larger pattern of change in the character of armed conflict from the midnineteenth century to the early twenty first century: from a period of improvisation andsporadic developments to one of scholarly professionalization and permanent andexpanding academic faculties.

I
The relationship between King’s College London and the British military and the state goesback to its foundation in 1829. The college was founded by a group of politicians andChurchmen who wanted a Church of England alternative education institution to the radical
and secular University College London (‘Godless Gower Street’). Prominent among them
was the Prime Minister and victor over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of
Wellington.1 Despite Wellington’s involvement though, the college did not host militarystudies for the first two decades of its existence. A Department of Military Science wasfounded in 1848, the year of revolutionary turmoil and violence across Europe. Fear ofimpending revolutions and the prospect of armed conflict on the continent created ademand for army officers. The Royal Military College at Sandhurst did not possess thecapacity to meet the full requirements for the British Army. At the initiative of the Principal
and theologian, Reverend Richard W. Jelf, King’s College London organized as an act of* Author Affiliation: Joseph A. Maiolo, Professor of International History in the Department of War Studies atKing’s College London, and Visiting Research Professor at the Norwegian Defence Intelligence School, Oslo.
1 Hearnshaw, The centenary history of King’s College, pp. 13-96.

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public service an education programme for aspiring officer cadets. The course consisted ofthree parts: divinity, including the study of the Bible and the Catechism; history, languages,
mathematics and natural philosophy; the third was military education, which included
strategy, tactics, fortifications and surveying. In total forty-one candidates earned theirmilitary education at King’s. However, the Department of Military Science did not flourish.
The top brass of the British Army felt unease about military training that was not under
their control or at least supervision, especially training conducted in the main byclergymen. Despite the outbreak of the Crimean War in October 1853 and the resulting
expansion of the British army and navy, enrolments in the programme dwindled and thedepartment closed in 1859.2
Even with the closure of Military Science in 1859, the study of military engineering andmilitary history continued at King’s. However, the college was still for the most part an
Anglican seminary run by churchman for mainly ecclesiastical purposes. A key
development occurred in 1885 with the appointment of the mathematician and historian
John Knox Laughton in 1885 to the Professorship of Modern History. Laughton taught in
the Department of Literature and Science, which prepared boys between the ages of 15 and
18 for further study at Oxford or Cambridge or for entry into the civil service. He madegreat strides in advancing the study of what we would today call ‘strategic studies’ atKing’s and in Britain more generally. For example, he co-founded the Naval Record
Society. He also brought a mathematical rigor to what he described as the ‘scientific study’of naval history.3 In 1914, the year that Laughton retired and the year that the First World
War broke out in Europe, Military Science was once again approved of as a subject for the
BSc general degrees, and was taught during the war under the Faculty of Arts and theFaculty of Engineering. The college also became a centre for military related scientificresearch.4 After the First World War, Military Science was once again abolished. It is notclear why that happened, but my guess is that cuts to military spending after what was themost-costly war ever and a sense of a ‘new world order’ founded on the peaceful resolutionof disputes through the League of Nations meant that for many the subject was at best
redundant. In 1927, however, the British War Office sponsored the foundation of a Military
Studies Department at King’s – the purpose of which was at least in part to assist with thewriting of the official history of the 1914-18 war and to prepare young men for military
service. In 1943, the Military Studies Department became the Department of War Studies –which continued to operate until 1948.5

II
As we have seen, until the end of the Second World War, ‘war studies’ at King’s fell into apattern of rise, decline and abolition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It would
rise when there was a demand for military studies under the pressure of impending or
actual armed conflict and decline when external investments dried up and war seemed aremote concern. That cycle of rise and decline was broken in 1962, in the context of the
protracted Cold War and the ever-present danger of the nuclear arms race, when the War
Studies Department that I belong to was established. Our ‘foundational myth’ credits thissuccess to the heroic efforts and stellar reputation of one man, Sir Michael Howard. And, in
2 Ibid., pp. 176-8.
3 Lambert, The foundations of naval history, pp. 226-8, 233.
4 Hearnshaw, The centenary history of King’s College, pp. 460-7.
5 Huelin’s King’s College London, pp. 92-100, does not discuss either the pre-war or wartime departments.

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The Development of War Studies at King’s College London
fact, as Brian Holden-Reid has argued, it is difficult to think of anyone who had a greater
influence in post-war Britain on military history and contemporary military policy andstrategic studies than Michael Howard. Born in 1922, he came from a family of Quakers.
In 1942, while studying for a degree in history at Oxford University, he was appointed an
office cadet in the Cold Stream Guards, one of the elite units of the British Army. He saw
combat in Italy from 1943 to the end of the war. After the war, he completed his education
and wrote the wartime history of his regiment.6 At that time his talents as a lecturer and awriter was noticed by a group of senior academics at the University of London who were
trying to re-introduce military studies in the curriculum. He joined the History Department
at King’s College London in 1947; six years later he was his title was changed to Lecturer
in Military Studies. At that time, he was writing a history of the Franco-Prussian war of
1870-71 and lobbied for more appointments in the field of military history. The story ofwhat happened is not entirely clear, but what we do know is that the head of the History
Department refused to expand military history and objected to Howard’s high profile work
as a journalist on strategic matters.7 Even so, Howard was an extremely popular lecturer
and in great demand as an advisor on UK and US defence policy. His success was difficult
to deny and perhaps in an effort to rid the History Department of military studies he was
encouraged to establish a one-year MA programme in War Studies and in 1962 a small
department by that name.
The reason why I am dwelling on Michael Howard is that to this day most of us still
adhere to the humane values and the approach to the study of war he advocated. First, inthe field of military history he pioneered the ‘war and society’ approach – in other words a
military history that looked well beyond operational history to examine, the social, politicaland cultural origins and impact of armed conflicts. Second, he argued that the study ofhistory needed to engage with contemporary debates about foreign and defence policy. For
example, his 1972 book The Continental Commitment explored the long history of Britain’s
ambivalent involvement in European politics and advocated Britain’s continuing
contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of substantial ground forces
to West Germany’s defence. Third, Howard believed that war was too complex andmultifaceted to be studied solely from one discipline. It demanded the collaborative effortsof the humanities, the social sciences and other disciplines.8
The first four decades of the Department’s existence exhibited these features. Howard andothers such as Brian Bond, Brian Holden-Reid, Michael and Saki Dockrill wrote of the twoworld wars and the Cold War from a broad perspective. Members of the department such as
Lawrence Martin, Lawrence Freedman and Beatrice Heuser regularly contributed to policy
debates about nuclear deterrence and foreign policy. Freedman in fact combined the rolesof contemporary strategic analyst and historian – he helped to establish with Michael
Howard the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and he was the official
historian of the 1982 Falkland Islands War.9 Although until the early 2000s the department
never exceeded about 6 to 8 full and part-time faculty, it always included a range ofscholars from various disciplines including international relations specialists, sociologists
and philosophers.10
In the 1980s and 1990s the faculty of War Studies was still never greater than the number
6 Reid, ‘Michael Howard’, pp. 869-904.
7 Howard, Captain professor, pp. 140-52.
8 Reid, ‘Michael Howard’.
9 Howard, Captain professor, pp. 153-65; Freedman, The official history of the Falklands Campaign 2 vols.
10 See for instance Paskins and Dockrill, Ethics of war.

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of people you could fit into the back of a London taxi. Certainly, the full and part time staff
never exceeded 12; they taught one MA programme of about 30 students per year and acohort of doctoral candidates of about 50. When I was hired, I was the first new faculty
member to join the department in five years. But the day I joined the Department
everything began to change dramatically; that day was 11 September 2001. In the lastfifteen years, with the onset of wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and the security
challenges posed by terrorist attacks, War Studies changed in scale and scope. The
Department grew at a remarkable rate. We now have 50 permanent faculty and about 10
part timers. We have 30 research staff, which includes post-docs on short term contracts
and permanent researchers. For a department that up until recently did not teachundergraduates, we now have 700 in total and that number is set to rise to about 1000. We
have 400 MA students, and close to 200 PhD students. This growth was not limited to ourcentral campus on the Strand. In the Spring of 2000 the college won a government contract
to provide professional military education to the British armed forces and we establishedthe Department of Defence Studies, which is located at the UK’s Joint Command and Staff
College at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. The Department of Defence Studies is now in fact
much bigger than War Studies – it has 65 permanent faculty and a large number of researchstaff and non-students. The two departments are now organized into one School of Security
Studies, which is part of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy. No doubt
Reverend Jelf would be astonished if he could visit the college now and see how hisoriginal vision of King’s providing military education had been realised over a century
later.

III
Since September 2001 not only has the rate of growth in War and Defence Studies beenastonishing, but the focus has widened too. When I was hired in September 2001 most of
the faculty were historians studying the two world wars and the onset of the Cold War; now
most are political scientists dealing with a wide range of contemporary security issues;back in 2001 most of the faculty were British men, but now we have a very international
faculty with a large number of Americans, Canadians, European. The gender balance within
the faculty has improved markedly in the last five years. That growth in diversity is also
true of our students. The change in focus and range of interests is also reflected in our
teaching. From a starting position in 2000 of no undergraduate students in the department,
we now have two programmes, Bachelor of Arts (BA) War Studies and BA International
Relations. The BA International Relations also has a joint BA programme with History inInternational History.
The biggest proliferation in programmes of study is at the Master of Arts (MA) level – we
now have 14 specialised MAs. Some of these are small such as Science and Security andSouth Asia and Global Security; some are medium sized such as War Studies, International
Peace & Security, and Terrorism, Security & Society; and some are huge such as
International Relations, Conflict, Security & Development and Intelligence Studies. A lot ofthese programmes may sound similar but each has its own distinct character and emphasis
ranging from the practical such as Science & Security or Counter Proliferation Studies tothe very abstract such as International Relations. International Peace & Security forexample is in fact an advanced course in international relations theory for international
lawyers; Science & Security is a very small programme of only 5 or 6 students a year but it－ 20 －

The Development of War Studies at King’s College London
is funded by the MacArthur Foundation specifically to offer scientists a security studies
education – something that the foundation believes is essential for future security. The MA
in Intelligence Studies which attracts about 90 students a year is unique in that it is taught
with input and assistance from former practitioners. The important contribution of former
officials is exemplified by Professor Sir David Omand’s contribution to our teaching. He is
a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’ssignals intelligence agency, and author of important scholarly contributions to intelligencestudies. 11 Most of the graduates find employment in the risk analysis or open source
intelligence sector in banking and international business and increasingly in cyber security
firms. We also offer a version of this MA to the UK cabinet office to train intelligence
analysts – an initiative that began with the investigation into the 2003 Iraq Weapons ofMass Destruction (WMD) intelligence failure.12
Let me now turn to our research. Owing to UK-wide government programmes formeasuring research publications and income we are not only encouraged to publish but also
to win major research grants. Thus, our total research income in 2015 was £15 million, butthat figure does not include money for research that comes direct from UK government as
part of the central grant for funding the university.13 The full list of our research centres andgroups offers a broad sense of the Department’s main research projects:
Research Centres

Research Groups

Centre for Defence Studies
Afghanistan Studies
Centre for Science & Security Studies
Africa Research Group
European Centre for Energy & Resource Arts & Conflict Hub
Security
Asian Security & WarfareInternational Centre for the Study of Conflict, Security & Development
Radicalisation
Foresight: Early Warning & Preventive
Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History Policyof WarInsurgency
King’s Centre for Military Health Research Intelligence & International Security
Marjan Centre for the Study of War and the Laughton Naval History
Non- Human Sphere Research
Private Military & Security
Centre in International Relations
Russian & Eurasian Security
War Crimes
The twelve research groups include PhD students and two of them are organized by
students. Some were once very large such as the War Crimes group but student interest inthat area has declined; Afghanistan and counter-insurgency remains core interests among
PhDs but we no longer have very many faculty working in those fields any longer – areflection of Britain’s withdrawal from the country and I think a decline in faith of counterinsurgency as a kind of proxy activity for building stable democratic states. As you can also
see from the list above we have eight research centres; each of these either has a large
research grant to fund it or it is associated with a particular MA programme. I will not run
11 Omand, Securing the state.
12 Goodman and Omand, ‘What analysts need to understand’, pp. 1-12.
13 For more information see the 2014 Research Excellence Framework submission and results for King’s

College London Politics and International Studies see http://results.ref.ac.uk/Results/BySubmission/613 (Last
accessed on 30 April 2017)－ 21 －JOSEPH A. MAIOLO
through each of them in detail but instead let me highlight some of the most importantcentres, the ones that I hope will give you a sense of our current major research themes,
which also naturally reflect pressing issues in the field of international security moregenerally.
•• The Centre for Defence Studies is our main connection with the UK government interms of advising on defence policy. It includes several former officials and most of
its research output is directly related to current policy debates. So, recent studies
focused on ‘convention force deterrence’ and another on ‘defence estates’. Staff often
appear in front of parliamentary committees to give evidence and offer advice. They
also provide professional development training for the UK MoD, various police forces
and foreign governments. A good example of this sort of engagement with government
was Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman’s role in the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War
and the WMD intelligence failure.14•• I have already mentioned that the Centre for Science and Security has a McArthur
Foundation grant to help fund it but most of its money comes from research andtraining related to counter-proliferation of WMD, nuclear disarmament and arms
control. They also have a very important programme of research into the preventionof nuclear terrorism in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA) and the US Department of Energy.
•• The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) is probably ourmost widely known research unit. Launched in 2008 thanks to a very generous private
donation, it aims to provide policy makers and security services with rigorous
research into radicalisation and political violence with a particular focus on Jihadism
and the waves of foreign volunteers who had flocked to Syria to fight. The centre’s
director has given evidence to the UN Security Council on the problem of foreign
fighters. Dr Shiraz Maher, the deputy director, is the leading expert on Jihadism in
Syria and Iraq.15•• Our newest research is the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War.
King’s College London has the largest concentration of historian of war in the world,
but unfortunately there was no outward looking unit or identity to draw attention tothat fact. Although the centre has only been active since the summer of 2014, it has
already hosted several conference and public events, including the launch of theCambridge History of the Second World War, and many events related to centenary of
the First World War.
This brief overview should offer you a sense of some of the main research themes we focus
upon, but I should also take a moment and mention some of our latest initiatives, which
includes a new research initiative on reintegrating former female combatants in northern
Siri Lanka, and a large grant to explore the relationship between the Arts and reconciliation
in former war torn regions. As you will note, the college’s research in the field of war
studies has shifted with the development of new challenges in international security.

14 For the report of the Iraq Inquiry see http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/ (Last accessed on 30 April
2017)
15 Neumann, Radicalized; Maher, Salafi-Jihadism.

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The Development of War Studies at King’s College LondonIV
By way of conclusion, let me turn to the difficulties and challenges in developing War
Studies as an academic community and as a larger research project. Certainly, the biggest
challenge is simply answering the question: What is War Studies? As you will have noted,
what that means has evolved and expanded rapidly over the last fifteen years. Frankly we
don’t even try to define it – apart from the regular intervals when we are forced to make aconcrete statement by the institution or UK national assessments processes in teachingquality. We usually simply refer back to the defining principles laid out by Michael Howard– inter-disciplinary research, a keen sense of history and a strong connection with realworld problems. Clearly this creates some problems for students, who know they want tocome to us to learn but do not always know what to expect. I should underscore the factthat the only time when we have had disputes in the department is when we have tried todefine ourselves – live and let live so long as you work on scholarly research related to war
seems to be the most stable formula. A related problem to the one of a lack of an agreed
definition of ‘war studies’ is a lack of intellectual cohesion. When the department could fit
into the back of a taxi it was easy for everyone to know about each other’s research and toparticipate in a joint seminar programme. Nowadays, on any given day of the week in term
time we have five or six different seminars going on at the same time on any one of three
campuses. Every attempt to organize a faculty research seminar has failed and I think will
fail because we simply are too big and too diverse for that sort of single-minded cohesion
and effort. At a time when the problems posed by war are so diverse, this flexibility of
approach is in fact an asset.
While one of our great strengths is that we are close to governments and we have had an
impact on policy making in various countries and a number of our faculty have participatedin official inquiries, defence reviews, official histories and so on, we are sometimes
perceived by colleagues outside of King’s as being too close to the state. This perception is
mistaken. There is no single political or scholarly consensus among the faculty that frames
our research. Like Michael Howard himself, many of the current faculty have been for
instance staunch critics of the ‘War on Terror’ and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 16 At King’s
we are in fact a very long way away from the 1840s, when Principal Jelf sought to educate
young officer cadets to ‘harmonize’ the College’s activities with those of the Church of
England and the British state.17 The reality is that in a globalised world troubled by war thefaculty need to be sufficiently independent and critical to offer rigorous and relevant
scholarly work to those who need and want our knowledge and understanding, but also
close enough to governments, international organizations and other institutions for theaccess to conduct that research. Striking the right balance requires the application of good
judgement and sound scholarly ethics.

16 Reid, ‘Michael Howard’, pp. 901-2; Howard, Captain professor, pp. 2017-20.
17 Hearnshaw, Centenary history of King’s College, pp. 176-8.

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References
Freedman, L. The official history of the Falklands campaign 2 vols. (2007).
Goodman, M. and Omand, D., ‘What analysts need to understand: the king’s intelligence studies
programme’, Studies in Intelligence 52:4 (2008), pp. 1-12
Hearnshaw, F.J.C., The centenary history of King’s College, London, 1828-1928 (1929).
Huelin, G., King’s College London, 1828-1978 (London, 1978)
Howard, M., Captain professor: the memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (2006)
Lambert, A.D., The foundations of naval history: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the historicalprofession (1998)
Maher, S., Salafi-Jihadism: the history of an idea (2016)
Neumann, P., Radicalized: new jihadists and the threat to the west (2016)
Omand, D., Securing the state (2012)
Paskins, B., and Dockrill, M.L., Ethics of war (1979)
Holden Reid, B., ‘Michael Howard and the evolution of modern war studies’, The Journal of Military
History, 73:3 (2009), pp. 869-904.

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