ABSTRACT
What’s so special about military research methods? And why a whole book dedicated to them? This edited collection aims to comment on and give testament to the specificity of military research and the variety of methods deployed to address it. Military research poses a unique set of practical challenges for researchers working in civilian research contexts – challenges which are seldom found in other spheres of social-scientific research. These might relate to issues of access (to certain spaces, to research participants, to classified or redacted documents), to gatekeeper relations amid a convoluted and often gendered military hierarchical culture, or to the sensitivities of remembrance and the violation of bodies. Our original starting point with this book, informed by our own experiences and those of colleagues investigating a range of military-related topics in the social sciences and humanities, was to explore these sorts of issues in quite practical terms. We feel there is an urgent need for this since, although social science and humanities research into the military and the militarisation of Western democracies has developed and expanded in recent years, there is much more work to do. We argue that this lack of research is due, at least in part, to the unique challenges of developing military research methodologies, and hope that this collection may facilitate new and empirically rich scholarship from critical military perspectives.
