The study of militarism: English-speaking world scholarship and Turkey’s scholarship compared

Abstract

Militarism has attracted academic attention since late seventeenth century. Scholars have defined and studied militarism in different ways. While during the First World War, militarism was studied as an ideology, in the post – Second World War period civil-military relations was the focus of analysis. Since the 1970s, the scholarship on militarism began to diversify. During the late 1980s, scholars started to study militarism as a sociological and historical phenomenon. This thesis aims to analyze how militarism has been studied in (English-speaking) world scholarship and in Turkey. By adopting meta-study technique, the thesis identifies the similarities and differences between the two bodies of scholarship. In the concluding section, the thesis discusses what Turkey’s scholarship on militarism has focused on and overlooked in comparison to world scholarship.