War & Society is an international, peer reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra. 

Established in 1983, War & Society publishes four issues per year featuring high-quality scholarly articles on the causes, experience and impact of war. Our articles feature original research based on archival, oral, and other primary sources.  

While we publish articles dealing with the technical and operational aspects of warfare, our main emphasis is on the broader relationships between warfare and society. Our articles range in time from Ancient Greece to the 21st Century, and highlight the diverse aspects of national and transnational operational and social military history.  

In addition to our research articles, commissioned historiographical review articles written by experts in their respective fields reflect on the current state of the field in military history scholarship. 

Our special issues, produced by high-profile guest editors, feature the latest research and conference outputs. 

War & Society does not review books. 

The current editor is Associate Professor Eleanor Hancock.

Why submit to War & Society? 

  • prestigious specialist military history journal devoted to the causes, experience and impact of war
  • double-blind peer reviewed articles feature cutting edge research and timely contributions to existing debates
  • world-wide access to your research; 33k+ annual downloads/views
  • high impact authors such as Joan Beaumont Joanna Bourke, Tim Cook, Aimée Fox, Vikki Hawkins, Beatrice Heuser, Urvi Khaitan, Yasmin Khan, Brian McAllister Linn, Jessica Meyer, Annika Mombauer, SP MacKenzie, Dieter Reinisch, Bastian Matteo Scianna, Peter H Wilson, and Jay Winter.
  • core British, American, European and Australasian readership via extensive network of academic libraries 
  • we welcome open access publication

40th Anniversary

From humble beginnings to international standing, the ‘War & Society’ Journal celebrates 40th anniversary.

In 1982, Emeritus Professor Peter Dennis was tasked with establishing a military history journal – something he had no idea where to even start with. He would not be able to predict how far the War & Society Journal would come; internationally renowned and celebrating its 40th anniversary since its first publication.

Find out more

  • War & Society regularly publishes special issues and invites prospective editors to get in touch. Our collection can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ywar20/special-issues 

    War & Society commissions historical review articles. Our collection can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ywar20/collections/Historiographical-Survey-Collection

    To mark War & Society’s fortieth anniversary, our board member Professor Brian Linn convened a distinguished group of military historians, including members of the journal’s editorial advisory board, to reflect on the continued existence, or vanishing, of grand narratives and the consequences of this. These reflections provide an overview of the state of the field four decades on from our original issue in May 1983 and can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ywar20/collections/A-Forty-Year-Perspective 

    • Andrew Tzavaras, ‘Two Perceptions of Süleyman’s “Magnificent” Navy during the Later Italian Wars’
    • Alessandro De Cola, ‘Money and the Regularisation of African Soldiers in the Early Phase of Italian Colonialsm in Eritrea’
    • Peter Overlack, The German Naval Intelligence Network in East Asia and Australia before the First World War’
    • Martin Samuels, ‘Operation Buckshot: Churchill’s Forgotten Offensive against Rommel, March–May 1942’
    • Timothy Baycroft & Bernard Wilkin, ‘The balloon post during the siege of Paris, 1870–71’
    • Lindsey R. Peterson, ‘The Defenders, Protectors and Builders of Our State’: The Colonial Legacy of Union Civil War Commemorations in Kansas, 1870s–1910s’
    • Alexandros Makris, Domestic dimensions of a transnational problem: social welfare for veterans in Greece (1912–1940)
    • Junhui Qin, Regigion and Nationalism: Reform of Lamaism in Inner Mongolia by the Japanese’
    • Adam R. Seipp, ‘Fulda Gap: A board game, West German society, and a battle that never happened, 1975–85’ 
    • Joan Beaumont, ‘Australian military historiography’
    • Kaushik Roy, ‘Revisiting British–India’s Military Historiography’
    • John H. Gill, ‘From Great Captains to Common Grognards: research opportunities in Napoleonic military history’
    • S.P. Mackenzie, ‘Per Ardua: Achievements, issues, and opportunities in writing the history of the Royal Air Force’  
  •  The ancient world
    • Daniel Gómez-Castro, ‘Ancient Greek Mercenaries: Facts, Theories and New Perspectives’
    • Matthew Trundle, ‘The Spartan Revolution: Hoplite Warfare in the Late Archaic Period’          
    Early modern history
    • John Childs, ‘War, Crime Waves and the English Army in the Late Seventeenth Century’
    • Lorraine White, ‘Spain’s Early Modern Soldiers: Origins, Motivations and Loyalty’
    First World War
    • Nadja Durbach, ‘The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners during the First World War’
    • Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Langemarck, Verdun and the Myth of a New Man in Germany after the First World War’
    Second World War
    • Stephen G. Fritz, ‘”This is the Way Wars End, With a Bang not a whimper”: Middle Franconia in April 1945’
    • Kisho Tsuchiya, ‘Indigenization of the Pacific War in Timor Island: A Multi-language Study of its Contexts and Impact’
    Air
    • S.P. MacKenzie, ‘Sensory Stress and Personal Agency: Emotional Casualty Rates amongst USAAF Heavy Bomber Crews over Europe during the Second World War’
    • Alastair Noble, ‘A Most Distant Target: The Bombing of Königsberg, August 1944’
    Naval
    • Ang Chang Guan, ‘The Domino Theory Revisited: the Southeast Asia Perspective’
    • J.Y. Wong, ‘The Limits of Naval Power: British Gunboat Diplomacy in China from the Nemesis to the Amethyst, 1839–1949’
    The Americas
    • Karen Jones, ‘The story of Comanche: horsepower, heroism and the conquest of the American West’
    • Robert Niebuhr, ‘The Road to the Chaco War: Bolivia’s Modernisation in the 1920s’
    Africa
    • Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, ‘Transforming Conflicts with Information: Impacts of UN Peace Radio Programmes in the Democratic Republic of Congo’
    • Jacqueline de Vries, ‘Cameroonian Schutztruppe Soldiers in Spanish-Ruled Fernando Po during the First World War: A ‘Menace to the Peace’?’
     Asia
    • Van Nguyen-Marshall, ‘Appeasing the Spirits Along the ‘Highway of Horror’: Civic Life in Wartime Republic of Vietnam’
    • Kumar Ramakrishna, ‘Anatomy of a Collapse: Explaining the Malayan Communist Mass Surrenders of 1958’
    Australasia
    • Jenny Macleod, ‘The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 Compared’
    • Kirsty Muir, ‘Public Peace, Private Wars: The Psychological Effects of War on Australian Veterans’
    Europe
    • Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Feeding the Ottoman Troops on the Danube, 1768–1774’
    • Kees Boterblom, ‘Dutch Mercenaries in the Tsar’s Service: The Van Bockhoven Clan’
    Concepts
    • Beatrice Heuser, ‘Misleading Paradigms of War: States and Non-State Actors, Combatants and Non-Combatants’
    • Richard J. Reid, ‘Revisiting Primitive War: Perceptions of Violence and Race in History’
    Culture
    • Robert K Chester, ‘Crusading in Africa: Religion, Race, and Post-9/11 Intervention in Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun (2003)’
    • Peter Conolly-Smith. ‘Race-ing Rape: Representations of Sexual Violence in American Combat Films’
    Economy and society
    • Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘Controlling Civilian Volunteering: Canada and Australia during the Second World War’
    • Anthony Page, ‘The Seventy Years War, 1744–1815, and Britain’s Fiscal-Naval State’
    Gender
    • Adam Dighton, ‘Race, Masculinity and Imperialism: The British Officer and the Egyptian Army (1882–1899)’
    • Jutta Schwarzkopf, ‘Combatant or Non-Combatant? The Ambiguous Status of Women in British Anti-Aircraft Batteries during the Second World War’
    Memory and commemoration
    •  Vesna Drapac, ‘The Memory of War and the History of the First Yugoslavia’
    •  Helen B. McCartney, ‘Commemorating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in Britain’
  • Visit War & Society's detailed index of articles from Volume 1 (1983) to Volume 39 (2020) - almost 40 years of published articles.

    Articles are listed by volume and issue, subject and author alphabetically and can be found here:  https://www.tandfonline.com/pb-assets/tandf/authors/YWAR_index_v1_1983_v39_2020-1629727340137.pdf

  • For more information, please email the editor at warsoc@adfa.edu.au

    Full details regarding published articles, aims and scope of journal, and instructions for authors (including how to submit) can be found at the journal's website:  https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ywar20

    Social media: find us on X @warsocjournal