Start date: 1 October 2018
Swansea University is proud to offer 15 fully-funded PhD scholarships for students commencing study in October 2018 or January 2019.
The scholarships will be awarded on the basis of student excellence across a portfolio of 34 potential projects.
Project details:
Across the political spectrum, studies show that there is increasing acceptance of the belief that military strategies provide solutions to complex social, political, cultural, and economic problems. This is the essence of militarism, the contradictory and tense social processes in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence. Underlining the need to consider the longer history of such processes, this PhD project will undertake a case study of militarism and processes of militarization in post-1945 Europe. It will address the following questions: How have cultural instruments such as education and religion but also pre-military training sustained militarism? How have mass/social media, literature, and film worked to promote militarization of society and culture? What have been the consequences of this process for security and foreign policy? And finally, what has been the nature of the relationship between militarization and democracy/authoritarianism? The PhD project will entail a detailed case study of cultural processes underlining militarization in one or more (national) societies. The study will consider such processes in the broader context of the long period of transition from ‘industrialized total warfare’ (18th-20th centuries) to ‘global surveillance warfare’ (post-Cold War – early 21st century) as defined by Martin Shaw (2013). The national area(s) of focus (UK, Germany, Italy or Russia), will be negotiated between the student and supervisors, and will depend on the academic background and language competence of the student.
The doctoral project will sit within the CRAM (Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory) Research Group, based in the College of Arts and Humanities and will build on strengths of the international research network which will enable the student to access world-class specialists in the field of critical military studies from the UK, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and Russia. The doctoral student will also benefit from the expertise of academic staff attached to the War and Society BA and MA programmes, and from research specialisms in peace, conflict, and security in the College more generally. The PhD studentship will be attached to a research project, ‘Militarization of the everyday in Europe: past practices and future developments’ (for which external funding is currently being sought from the Swedish funder (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (https://www.rj.se/en/Researcher-news/general-news/Apply/), and other funders, including the ESRC), co-run by Prof. Michael Sheehan (PI), Dr Eugene Miakinkov (Department of Political and Cultural Studies), Dr Jonathan Dunnage and Dr Christoph Laucht (Department of History) also involving cooperation with partners in Sweden (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), Italy (Bologna University), Cardiff University, and Russia (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration).
Miakinkov will act as first supervisor. Dunnage, Sheehan and Laucht will form the rest of the supervisory team, with Dunnage acting as Director of Studies. Miakinkov, who has expertise in military culture and history of militarism, is already supervising an ESRC-DTC PhD project on militarization of Russia (with Sheehan). Dunnage, a specialist in 20th-century Italian internal public security policy and culture, has supervised two PhDs to completion on the Allied occupation and administration of Italy. Dr Laucht, an expert on historical peace and conflict research with interests in the Cold War in Britain and Germany (currently supervising a funded PhD), and Prof. Sheehan, a specialist in international relations and security studies, notably the interface between technology, war and society, with an excellent PhD supervision track record, will provide additional supervisory support.
The successful applicant will have access to our Postgraduate Research Student Training programmes.
Established in 1997, Cardiff University is a non-profit public higher education institution located in the urban setting of the small city of Cardiff (population range of 250,000-499,999 inhabitants), Wales. Officially accredited and/or recognized by the Privy Council, Cardiff University (CU) is a very large (uniRank enrollment range: 30,000-34,999 students) coeducational higher education institution. Cardiff University (CU) offers courses and programs leading to officially recognized higher education degrees such as bachelor degrees, master degrees, doctorate degrees in several areas of study. See the uniRank degree levels and areas of study matrix below for further details. International applicants are eligible to apply for enrollment.