About

Tarak Barkawi is a military historian and an interdisciplinary scholar of war and armed force in world politics. His work examines the cultural and political dimensions of military history, with a focus on how war influences society and politics. His last book, Soldiers of Empire, explored the multicultural armies of British Asia during the Second World War, conceptualizing Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. This book received the American Historical Association’s 2018 Paul Birdsall Prize and the International Studies Association’s 2018 Francesco Guicciardini Prize. Currently, he is working on a project about the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior, analyzing soldiers’ history writing as a site for understanding war’s role in shaping society and politics. Barkawi has also published articles on war and democracy in international relations, postcolonial security studies, critical war studies, and Max Weber. He has taught professional soldiers in the UK, the US, NATO, and elsewhere, and has published commentary on global affairs.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Political economy
• History
• Art
• Psychology
• Economic history
• Economics

Selected publications

• Exclusion and Erasure in Disciplinary Histories

  Global Intellectual History · 2026-01-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Is ‘Historicism’?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Over the course of its history, International Relations (IR) has meant very different things to people in different disciplines, national contexts, and time periods, often coming to label schools within various disciplines with specific and contested philosophies of history. Unsurprisingly, the field of IR, and by extension, International Political Sociology (IPS), has also imported some of this confusion regarding historicism and historical methods as it borrowed historiographical approaches and debates from other disciplines. This chapter breaks through this confusion by discussing some of the primary debates about historicism in some of the different fields and sub-fields studying the international. We first look at the historical turn in IR, then to history, and finally to the history of political thought.

  PublisherDOI

• Andrew T. Jarboe. <i>Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Andrew T. Jarboe. Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War. Get access Andrew T. Jarboe. Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 319. Cloth $60.00. Tarak Barkawi Tarak Barkawi Johns Hopkins University, US Email: t.k.barkawi@lse.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1054–1055, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad159 Published: 22 June 2023

  PublisherDOI

• War and History in World Politics

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-08-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter begins by reflecting on war as a force which shapes knowledge about it, both in History and in International Relations (IR). It outlines distinctions between history, historicism, and historiography, pointing out that granular studies can lead to conceptual and paradigmatic change. It introduces the significance of amateur, public, and veterans’ history, looking at their role in reproducing war and at their critical potential. The chapter turns to the war and society tradition for new resources for thinking about war in IR, discussing the problems involved in putting war and society into the same analytic frame. It looks at how war experience shapes military history, and in turn at how military histories shape identities and ways of warfare in world politics. The chapter closes with the example of a white supremacist military imaginary, sustained in part through popular and military history, and shaping actual wars.

  PublisherDOI

• Wishful Strategies

  Security Studies · 2023-03-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-04-24

  paratextOpen access

  Providing a novel multi-disciplinary theorization of memory politics, this insightful Handbook brings varied literatures into a focused dialogue on the ways in which the past is remembered and how these influence transnational, interstate, and global politics in the present.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The United Nations of IR: power, knowledge, and empire in Global IR debates

  International Theory · 2023 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This paper critiques a core premise of Global IR: the association of knowledge with geography, which we term geo-epistemology. It argues that ‘American’ and Global IR share a Eurocentric spatial imaginary, one that was a product of Western expansion and empire. Through its geo-epistemology, Global IR enables a conservative appropriation of the critique of Eurocentrism in IR. Globality becomes a matter of assembling sufficient geographic representation rather than an analysis of the discipline's political, historical, and spatial assumptions. Anglo-American policymakers and intellectuals invented the national/international world to replace the world of empires and races that came apart in the era of the world wars. This UN world of sovereign nation-states and their regional groupings was the foundational move of both what Stanley Hoffman called ‘the American social science’ – IR – and the American-centred world order. The paper uses the reception and legacy of Hoffman's classic essay to show how culture replaced power and history in the study of the discipline, obfuscating the Eurocentrism of Global IR.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 14. War and world politics

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-12-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines how war fits into the study of international relations and the ways it affects world politics. It begins with an analysis of the work of the leading philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz, to highlight the essential nature of war, the main types of war, and the idea of strategy. It then considers some important developments in the history of warfare, both in the West and elsewhere, with particular emphasis on interrelationships between the modern state, armed force, and war in the West and in the global South. Two case studies are presented, one asking the question about what is global about the global war on terror (GWOT) and the other examining the GWOT in the context of war and society, looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• War and decolonization in Ukraine

  New Perspectives · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This essay considers the Ukraine conflict as a war of decolonization. It understands decolonization as a practice of world order making that creates international relations out of imperial relations. What does such a perspective tell us about the conflict in Ukraine and its implications for world politics?

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the discussion on Lawson’s Anatomies of Revolution

  International Politics Reviews · 2021-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Faisal Devji

  University of Oxford

  16 shared

• James Mayall

  New York University Press

  16 shared

• Mark S. Etherington

  16 shared

• Mark Laffey

  12 shared

• Shane Brighton

  Queen's University Belfast

  10 shared

• Sandra Halperin

  5 shared

• Ole Jacob Sending

  4 shared

• Alison Howell

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  3 shared

Labs

• Political Science | Johns Hopkins UniversityPI

Awards & honors

• American Historical Association’s 2018 Paul Birdsall Prize
• International Studies Association’s 2018 Francesco Guicciard…