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.

Image: IWM Sisters in Arms (World War 2)