This list of books was compiled during our June Twitter hour. Do tweet or email us any other recommendations.

What are the key, go-to texts in your field of research?

Cynthia Enloe (1988) Does Khaki Become You: The Militarization of Women’s Lives. Boston: South End Press.

Ana Arjona (2017) Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press.

David French (2001) Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War Against Germany 1919-45. New York: Oxford University Press USA.

David M. Rosen (2005) Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Rachel Brett and Irma Specht (2004) Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

John Hockey (2006) Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Robert Cialdini (2007) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.

Frank Ledwidge (2017) Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Theo Farrell (2018) Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014. New York: Random House.

Have any books caused you to change or consider new methodologies for your research?

Carolyn Ellis (1999) Heartful Autoethnography. Qualitative Health Research, 9(5): 669–683.

Sarah Bulmer and David Jackson (2016) “You do not live in my skin”: embodiment, voice, and the veteran. Critical Military Studies, 2(1-2): 25-40.

Adam Dolnik (Ed) (2013) Conducting Terrorism Field Research: A Guide. Abingdon: Routledge.

Nigel Barley (2000) The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

Harry F. Wolcott (2009) Writing Up Qualitative Research, third edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Svend Brinkmann and Steinar Kvale (2018) Doing Interviews. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Jenny Rowley (2014) Designing and using research questionnaires. Management Research Review, 37(3): 308-330.

Sue Wilkinson (1998) Focus group methodology: a review. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1(3): 181-203.

Gerrard Noonan (2017) The IRA in Britain, 1919-1923: In the Heart of Enemy Lines. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Steven Wagner (2019) Statecraft by Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Are there any new or forthcoming books that excite you?

Kevin Jones (2021) Intelligence, Command and Military Operations: The Eighth Army Campaign in Italy 1943-45. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kathleen Sherit (2020) Women on the Frontline: British Servicewomen’s Path to Combat. Stroud: Amberley Publishing.

David Brenner (2019) Rebel Politics: a Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s borderlands. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Alison Howell (2018) Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(2): 117-136.

Alan Allport (2017) Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-45. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jonathan Fennell (2019) Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

John Ferris (2020) Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Bernard Lewis (2021) Neath’s Forgotten Hero: the Life of Henry Coombe-Tennant.Aberystwyth: Y Lolfa.

Kevin Riehle (2020) Soviet Defectors: Revelations of Renegade Intelligence Officers, 1924-1954.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

What is the one book you would recommend someone reads as an introduction to your field of research?

Joshua Goldstein (2001) War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duncan Exley (2019) The End of Aspiration?: Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects. Bristol: Policy Press.

Brian Parritt (2011) The Intelligencers: British Military Intelligence from the Middle Ages to 1929. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military.

Emile Simpson (2012) War From The Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics. London: Hurst.