Educating NATO’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Lessons from Russia’s War in Ukraine

This article argues that professional military education (PME) is a critical yet underused tool for advancing NATO’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing on adult-learning theory, Mariya Y Omelicheva proposes a live, scenario-based teaching model – using Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study – to integrate gender analysis into strategic education. The analysis demonstrates how gender perspectives can enrich conventional assessments of causality, risk and evidence, equipping military learners to better understand the drivers of conflict and societal resilience.

Preparing NATO Officers for Multi-Domain Operations: A Checklist for Future Competencies

NATO faces challenges in embracing multi-domain operations (MDO) as the concept that underpins its transformation as a warfighting entity. There is widespread confusion over what the concept means and how it can be operationalised. There is, therefore, a real danger that states – and the Alliance as a whole – will fail to build the underlying competencies that their officers will need, in what is predicted to be the future of war. Thomas Crosbie, Ian Bowers and Holger Lindhardtsen provide a checklist of nine MDO indicators to help to guide the development of officer competencies.

Mind the (Suwałki) Gap

The Suwałki Gap, running 70 km along the Polish/Lithuanian border, is all that separates Kaliningrad and Belarus. In the event of war or conflict between NATO and Russia, and its satellites, this region is likely to be one of the first flashpoints. The people who live here know that, and they know their history, too. In this photo-essay Kevin Rowlands and Andrew Young share their experience of exploring the Suwałki Gap this autumn.

Principles of Modern Tank Design

This article examines the evolving role of tanks in modern warfare, focusing on lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Josiah Mosser argues that while drones and precision-guided munitions challenge traditional armoured doctrine, tanks remain essential for combined arms operations. The article proposes that future designs must specialise for specific roles, balancing survivability, mobility and firepower to address emerging threats.

Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War Andrew Monaghan, Manchester University Press, 2025

Teaching within war in Ukraine: applying an ethic of care lens to extend our understanding of service-learning theory and praxis

Service-learning is an educational approach that has become part of the higher education landscape. Although research and scholarship in this area have flourished over the past thirty years, little is known about higher education teachers’ experiences when using service-learning within war. Utilizing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we explore this gap by interviewing university teachers living and working in Ukraine who incorporated service-learning into their courses within the first 1.5 years following the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Using a double hermeneutic approach, we draw a set of practice themes from their lived experience reflections. To better understand the underlying relationships among the practice themes and their fit within a context of war, we examine them through an ethic of care lens. The results offer novel insights and extend our understanding of the intersections between service-learning and care in two ways: (1) identifying a set of practices drawn from the reflections of higher education teachers who used service-learning in their courses within an environment of war and (2) contextualizing the resultant service-learning practices within an ethic of care framework to extend our understanding of service-learning theory and praxis.

Provident Imperialism: The De Bunsen Committee and British Language of Indirect Control over the Ottoman Empire

This article introduces the concept of ‘provident imperialism’ to analyse Britain’s calculated strategies during World War I, focusing on the de Bunsen Committee of 1915. Through linguistic contextualism, it examines the language used in committee reports, official documents, and memoirs to reveal how Britain’s officialdom advocated for indirect control, selective annexation, and cooperative arrangements to maintain dominance in the Ottoman Empire in preparation for the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The study highlights how political rhetoric legitimised Britain’s ambitions while addressing the territorial, diplomatic, and administrative complexities of inter-imperial settlement in the Middle East. By analysing primary sources, including the Hansard Papers and Foreign Office reports this article uncovers British imperialism’s semantic and pragmatic dynamics, demonstrating how linguistic strategies shaped policies to sustain Britain’s influence. This approach provides a nuanced perspective on imperialism, bridging formal and informal practices and contributing to the imperial history of Britain in the Middle East.

Persuasive Forests for Maritime Britain: Canada and Britain’s Maritime Power from the War of the Spanish Succession to the Seven Years’ War

This study examines the role of Canadian forest resources in British imperial expansion, highlighting how environmental factors such as timber supply influenced imperial policies, naval strategies, and territorial acquisitions from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Britain maintained a keen interest in North American forest resources from the perspective of enhancing its maritime power. This was articulated as a crucial consideration in the prosecution of warfare against France and imperial expansion in North America by contemporary politicians, administrators, military personnel, and pamphleteers. The British Empire's environmental approach to Canada, specifically regarding forest resources for naval power, was intimately connected with its approach to the Thirteen Colonies, while serving as justification for expansion into Canada. This study reveals how environmental rhetoric transformed into practical policy, particularly through the establishment of Halifax as a naval base. It also argues that expectations regarding natural resources, especially their naval value, served as a driving force behind imperial territorial expansion, emphasising the reciprocal relationship between political activities and environmental discourse. By examining how developments in one region influenced others, this study illuminates how territorial expansion and resource procurement expectations were bidirectionally linked, manifesting in political discourse during both war and peace.

If One is A Soldier of Our Great Empire There Should Be No Discrimination: Service and Mortality in Britain’s East African Colonial Military

In 2019, it came to light that the Imperial War Graves Commission, the predecessor to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), had left the remains of African and South Asian WWI dead unmarked to ‘revert to nature’. The documentary ‘ The Unremembered ’ struck a nerve in Britain by demonstrating that the commission had thus failed in its core commitment to equality in death and commemoration. The British government formally apologised for these failings, and the CWGC committed itself to making a comprehensive search of historical records to recover the personal details of non-Europeans who died in the service of the empire so they could be commemorated by name. Recovering the historical past is certainly a worthwhile enterprise. Yet it is naïve to be shocked by the commission’s failure to grant African soldiers equality in death because they did not have equality in life. Expanding the consideration of inequality in colonial military service to include recruitment, fighting, demobilisation, death and commemoration during WWII brings the fundamental exploitation of subject soldiers into sharper focus. Inscribing the names of forgotten war dead on memorials is an easy way to right a past imperial wrong, particularly when WWI is now comfortably remote.

Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law

Amid Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza, which began in 2023, this article interrogates the tension between anticolonial and colonial indistinction. By indistinction, I refer to the transgression of the civilian–combatant divide as posited in international law—the collapse of a boundary that structures dominant understandings of legitimate violence and protection. Engaging this question is fraught with risk, especially amid genocide, since Israel justifies its mass violence by claiming that Palestinian indistinction between combatants and civilians necessitates indiscriminate targeting. Yet refusing to engage this problem reaffirms the fiction that stateless, colonized peoples can achieve liberation only by adhering to statecentric and legalist prescriptions of civilian passivity. The article develops a decolonial critique of the dialectical relation between two forms of indistinction: first, the anticolonial indistinction enacted when liberation struggles dissolve the civilian–combatant divide; and second, the colonial indistinction through which empire rationalizes genocidal violence. Situating this inquiry within Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, I analyze the emergent form of anticolonial indistinction that has developed there—what I call a subterranean people's war—and its entanglement with Israel's war of annihilation. I conclude that colonial genocide is not a reactive counterpart to anticolonial indistinction but a structural potential of colonial domination, while anticolonial indistinction represents a liberatory ethos challenging the colonial order of violence.