The War & Diplomacy Podcast: From the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University

In this episode,  Dr Keith Hamilton discusses the vibrant social and administrative history of the nineteenth-century Foreign Office at Whitehall with the CWD's Prof Gaynor Johnson.  Dr Hamilton, formerly a historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has evaluated the records and accounts of domestic staff rather than just the higher levels of government agents to create a more comprehensive picture of diplomatic history.  This archival work has also served as the foundation for Dr Hamilton's latest book, Servants of Diplomacy. A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office (Bloomsbury, 2021), which is an invaluable complement to his wider work on the history of British diplomacy. 

To find out more about Servants of Diplomacy, or to order a copy, please visit the publisher's website:  https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/servants-of-diplomacy-9781350159150/

The CWD advises with sadness that Dr Keith Hamilton passed away in October 2023. You can find his obituary here:

We offer our condolences to Dr Hamilton's family, friends and colleagues.

In this podcast, Dr Thomas Mills, Senior Lecturer in Diplomatic and International History at Lancaster University and Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy is joined by Jussi Hanhimäki, Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. The pair discuss Jussi’s latest book, Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era, published by Oxford University in 2021, as well as the broader global significance of the US-UK relationship analysing more recent events and points of crisis. Pax Transatlantica offers a wide-ranging exploration of what Jussi Hanhimäki calls the transatlantic community in the fields of security, economic and politics in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both the podcast and book cover the impact of Brexit, the presidency of Donald Trump, and the coronavirus pandemic on transatlantic relations.

Jussi was previously a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC. He also received the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2002 and was elected Finland Distinguished Professor in 2006. His previous books include, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction, published in 2012, The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War from 2013 and edited collections on international terrorism and documents of the Cold War.

Dr Marco Wyss, Reader in International History and Security at Lancaster University and a Deputy Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy, is joined by Dr James Rogers, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at SDU and History Hit Warfare podcast host, on the topic of “Drones: From ‘Precision Warfare’ to Today’s Battlefields”. Drone warfare, perceived to be a relatively modern addition to the battlefield, transcends the threats of war on the ground but brings with it new threats to security and the potential for drone genocide. This podcast discusses the prominence of drones on today’s global battlefields, covering topics such as the evolution of drone development and their early practicality, as well as the future of air power and combat. In doing so, it traces the history of drone warfare to the early twentieth century, to the conceptualisation of precision bombing by the US in the First World War.

Dr James Rogers is Associate Fellow within The London School of Economics and Political Science’s foreign policy think tank (LSE IDEAS). He is also currently Special Advisor to the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drones, Advisor to the United Nations, a UK MoD Defence Opinion Leader, and NATO Country Director of the NATO SPS funded Vulnerabilities of the Drone Age project. He has previously been a Visiting Research Fellow at Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Oxford. He is the Co-founder and Co-Convenor of BISA War Studies, the War Studies section of the British International Studies Association. James is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow within the Cornell Tech Policy Lab at Cornell University. His forthcoming publication, Precision: A History of Warfare, with Manchester University Press, is out at the end of 2022.

The Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University and the British International History Group co-hosted ‘The Falklands War at 40: Voices of the Conflict’ on Thursday 26 May 2022, attended by staff and students, alongside members of local history groups, and the general public. This event brought together researchers and curators, joined by a Falklands veteran and Lancaster alumnus Major General Chip Chapman, to discuss working with voices of the conflict forty years on. A recording has been made into a podcast for the War and Diplomacy podcast series.

The panel was chaired by Professor Gaynor Johnson, Professor of International History at the University of Kent, Honorary Researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy, and Conference Officer of the British International History Group. Panellists included: Mr John Beales, a doctoral student at Keele University and Imperial War Museums, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Major General Chip Chapman, a platoon commander in 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (2 PARA) in the Falklands campaign. Dr Peter Johnston, Head of Collections and Research at the Royal Air Force Museum, responsible for developing the museum’s research and collection strategies, and exhibitions. Professor Helen Parr of Keele University, author of Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (Penguin, 2019), a history of the Parachute Regiment in the Falklands. Professor Tony Pollard of Glasgow University, a leading archaeologist working on sites of conflict from across history, and heading a new investigation into the landscape of the Falklands War.

Dr Stephanie Wright, lecturer in Modern European History at Lancaster University and Dr Regina Mühlhäuser, Senior Researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture discuss what the history of sexual violence perpetrated by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War can tell us about sexual violence in current wars, including the war in Ukraine. This podcast grapples with the challenges of studying the history of sexual violence, especially given the paucity of sources and the fact that many victims were shamed into silence. In conversation, Stephanie and Regina highlight the importance of being attentive to which stories of sexual violence we are willing to listen to, and which ‘constellations’ or ‘narratives’ of rape are given priority in historical and media accounts of particular wars.

Spyros Tsoutsoumpis, associate lecturer and researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University is joined by Dr Umit Kurt, research fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute/Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem. Joining Spyros and Umit to talk about the Armenian Genocide in Aintab are Professor Janet Klein and Dr Max Bergholz. Professor Janet Klein is an expert in the field of Ottoman Studies and the author of an outstanding monograph on Kurdish tribal militias, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone. Dr Max Bergholz from Concordia University, Canada, is an associate professor and the author of Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community. 

Dr Thomas Mills, Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University and Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy is joined by Patrick Salmon, Chief Historian at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development office. In his seventeen years in office, Patrick has published a number of volumes in the flagship series, Documents on British Policy Overseas, including works on German unification at the end of the Cold War and UK/South Africa relations during the era of apartheid. He also has expertise on Scandinavia and has published works including Scandinavia and the great powers 1890 to 1940, and Scandinavia in British policy during the twilight war, 1939 to 1940. His latest book is entitled The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History, published by University of London Press (2021). Mills and Salmon discuss this recently published work, looking at Patrick’s experience and expertise as well as his motivation for researching this topic.

This podcast discusses the merger of the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not only has Winfried extensively worked on this topic but it has also become a contentious historical issue in recent years as archival material has become available thirty years after the event. Heinemann and Wyss question whether the merger of the two Germanies and their armed forces after the end of the Cold War was in fact a merger, a hostile takeover or something in between with the transferral of East German personnel into the Bundeswehr.

Colonel Professor Winfried Heinemann has extensively researched the diplomatic history of NATO, post-World War II German military history (in both the East and West), and especially the military resistance against Hitler. His most recent book is Operation “Valkyrie”: A Military History of the 20 July 1944 Plot (De Gruyter Studies in Military History, 2021).

This special episode marks the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Boroughbridge and the execution of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, in 1322. This was the bloody end of a civil war that scarred one of England’s most troubled and turbulent reigns, that of Edward II. Dr Sophie Ambler is the Deputy Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy and author of The Song of Simon de Montfort: England's First Revolutionary and the Death of Chivalry (2019); Dr Andrew Spencer is Fellow and Senior Tutor of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and has published extensively on the nobility, politics and constitution of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England; Dr Paul Dryburgh is Principal Record Specialist at The National Archives, and has been at the forefront of new research into the records and government of the era for nearly twenty years. Paul, Andrew and Sophie are part of a team of researchers – from the The National Archives and the Universities of Lincoln, Cambridge and Lancaster– involved in a new collaborative research project: ‘A State within a State? The making of the Duchy of Lancaster, c.1066-1422’.

Dr Farzaneh, an Iranian native, is an associate professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University, specialising in the history of Iran, the modern Middle East, and Islamic civilisation. He is the author of The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Clerical Leadership of Khurasani (Syracuse University Press, 2015).