Research Methods in Defence Studies

This textbook provides an overview of qualitive and quantitative methods used in different social sciences to investigate defence issues.
Recently, defence issues have become of increasing interest to researchers in the social sciences, but they raise specific methodological questions. This volume intends to fill a gap in the literature on defence studies by addressing a number of topics not dealt with sufficiently before. The contributors offer a range of methodological reflections and tools from various social sciences (political science, sociology, geography, history, economics and public law) for researching defence issues. They also address the increasingly important question of data and digitalization. The book introduces the added value of quantitative and qualitative methods, and calls for a cross-fertilization of methods in order to facilitate better research on defence topics and to fully grasp the complexity of defence in the 21st century.
This book will be of much interest to students, researchers and practitioners of defence studies, war studies, military studies, and social science research methods in general.

Delphine Deschaux-Dutard is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University Grenoble Alpes, France. She is also a researcher at CESICE and Vice-Dean for International Relations at the Faculty of law at the same institution.

Introduction Delphine Deschaux-Dutard Part I : Qualitative methods in defence studies 1. Defence studies and geography: from the practical to the critical approach Amael Cattaruzza 2. Defence Studies as an emerging research field in Public Law Anne-Sophie Traversac 3. Historical methods in defence and war studies : the case of historical defence studies in France Christophe Lafaye 4. Secondary analysis of qualitative data in defence studies : methological opportunities and challenges Laurent Borzillo & Delphine Deschaux-Dutard 5. Defence studies and public policy analysis Catherine Hoeffler 6. Sociological methods in defence studies Gregor Richter Part II: Quantitative methods and defence studies 7. Quantitative methods applied to defence studies Mayeul Kauffmann 8. Databases for defence studies Mayeul Kauffmann 9. Economic methods for defence studies Julien Malizard 10.Constructing a Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database: Challenges of Data Collection, Classification, and Indexing Falk Ostermann, Florian Böller, Flemming J. Christiansen, Fabrizio Coticchia, Daan Fonck, Anna Herranz-Surrallés, Juliet Kaarbo Kryštof Kümáš, Michal Onderco, Rasmus B. Pedersen, Tapio Raunio, Yf Reykers, Michal Smetana, Valerio Vignoli, Wolfgang Wagner 11. The Other Civil-Military Gap. Researching Public Opinion on Security and Defence Policy Heiko Biehl, Markus Steinbrecher Conclusion: A plea for more cross-fertilization of methods in defense studies Delphine Deschaux-Dutard