Leverhulme Trust PhD Studentship: The Slavery-War Nexus in Historical/Contemporary Contexts

Start date: February 2027

King’s College London’s Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War is pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded doctoral studentship from February 2027.

We invite proposals on one of the following two subjects:

1. any aspect of historical war studies and slavery within the period 1791-1926;
2. any aspect of slavery in an occupation context from 2022-present.

Please note that this studentship is only open to applicants considered Home students under UKRI guidelines. Please do not submit more than one application to this call. Project Overview This fully funded PhD studentship invites applications from candidates with a strong grounding in war studies to undertake research that will contribute primarily to the centre’s Research Strand 2 (Understanding Slavery in War). We seek projects that fall within one of the following areas, reflecting priority areas of research for the centre.

1. Historical war studies and slavery in the period 1791 to 1926.

This period is one of extraordinary significance for both the history of slavery and the history of war. It opens with the Haitian Revolution of 1791 (the only enslaved-people's uprising in world history to result in the founding of a sovereign state) and closes with the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, the first international legal instrument to define and prohibit slavery as a universal norm. In between lie more than a century of global conflicts in which slavery was not incidental but constitutive: the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the wars of imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the First World War, and the post-war conflicts and upheavals that reshaped the international order. Across all of these, enslaved people, enslaved combatants, and coerced labour were central to the conduct, logic, and outcome of war. Yet war studies literature has tended to treat enslavement and enslaved people as peripheral, epiphenomenal, or invisible.

Working within RS2's focus on historical and archival analysis, the successful candidate will undertake an original, rigorously researched study of the slavery/war nexus in one or more conflicts or theatres during this period, contributing to the Centre's ambition of breaking new ground in understanding how slavery and war have interacted across modern history. The geographical scope is genuinely global: projects may focus on any region or conflict zone, and comparative or transnational approaches are welcome.

The studentship is deliberately open in terms of case study, to attract the strongest possible candidates and the most exciting research ideas. Possible areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:

• the role of enslaved labour and enslaved combatants in the wars of the Atlantic world;
• the use of forced labour in colonial warfare and imperial conquest;
• the intersection of military conscription, coerced service, and slavery;
• slavery's role in the logistics, supply chains, and infrastructure of ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ armies;
• the relationship between military occupation and the entrenchment or disruption of existing slavery systems;
• the ways in which wartime conditions generated new forms of coerced labour and exploitation.

Research questions

Candidates with their own clearly formulated research ideas within the 1791–1926 timeframe are strongly encouraged to bring those original ideas to the application. The following questions are indicative of the intellectual terrain the Centre will explore in the coming years:

• What light does the slavery/war nexus shed on the causes, conduct, and consequences of specific conflicts, and how does attention to slavery change existing historiographical interpretations?
• How did slavery function as a resource within armed conflicts of the long nineteenth century, and with what consequences for the conduct and outcomes of those conflicts?
• What were the relationships between military force (whether state armies, colonial forces, irregular militias, or imperial navies) and the perpetuation, disruption, or transformation of slavery?
• How did the experience of war shape the lives, agency, and resistance of enslaved people, and how did their choices and actions influence the course of conflicts?
• In what ways did wartime conditions give rise to new or hybrid forms of coercion, exploitation, and unfree labour, and how were these understood by contemporaries?
• How did the international legal and normative frameworks governing both war and slavery evolve during this period, and what were the connections between anti slavery diplomacy and the laws and customs of war?

Candidates should be prepared to engage with primary sources — archival, documentary, and printed — as the foundation of their research. The range and location of relevant archives will depend on the case study chosen, but may include national, colonial, military, and diplomatic repositories in the UK and internationally. The Centre's methodological approach is interdisciplinary, and the successful candidate will benefit from training and collaboration across historical, social science, and data science methods. While this studentship is grounded in historical and archival practice, candidates who wish to engage with quantitative, digital, or comparative methods are warmly encouraged to do so.

2. Slavery in an Occupation Context, 2022-present

Occupation is one of the few conditions of war in which coerced labour is directly and explicitly regulated. The Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention set limits on the compulsory labour an occupying power may demand of a civilian population; prohibit compelling protected persons to serve in its armed forces; and forbid the forcible transfer and deportation of civilians from occupied territory. The Rome Statute makes enslavement a crime against humanity and treats sexual slavery and the conscription of children as war crimes. Yet the period opened by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and extended by the war in Gaza, has produced a body of documented practice (abduction, deportation, filtration, detention, conscription, the transfer of children, exploitation under conditions of engineered deprivation) that is rarely analysed as a single phenomenon, and rarely analysed as slavery.

Working within RS2's focus on understanding slavery in war, the successful candidate will undertake an original study of slavery in one or more contemporary cases of occupation. The studentship is deliberately open in terms of case study, to attract the strongest possible candidates and the most exciting research ideas. Possible areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:

• forced and compulsory labour extracted from occupied populations, including in construction, agriculture, extraction, and reconstruction;
• forced conscription and the coerced recruitment of occupied populations into armed forces, militias, or auxiliary and support units;
• the recruitment and use of children, in combat and in non-combat roles;
• sexual slavery, forced marriage, and coercion arising from detention, displacement, and acute deprivation;
• the transfer, deportation, and screening of civilians, and the subsequent questions of identification, tracing, and return;
• trafficking routes and networks generated or reconfigured by occupation, displacement, and the closure of borders;
• the political economy of occupation, including supply chains, contracts, and the commercial beneficiaries of coerced labour.

Research questions

Candidates with their own clearly formulated research ideas within the 2022–present timeframe are strongly encouraged to bring those original ideas to the application. The following questions are indicative of the intellectual terrain the Centre will explore in the coming years:

• What forms does slavery take under contemporary occupation, and how far do concepts developed in historical and modern slavery studies capture them?
• How do the administrative structures of occupation (registration, permits, checkpoints, detention, screening, the regulation of movement and aid) produce the conditions under which coercion becomes possible, or unremarkable?
• What is the relationship between occupation and the market, and who benefits materially from coerced labour in occupied territory?
• How do occupied populations themselves understand, name, resist, and survive these practices, and what changes when their testimony is placed at the centre of analysis?
• What are the capacities and the limits of existing legal frameworks in addressing slavery under occupation, and how are they being tested by current cases?
• How can slavery in occupation be identified, measured, and evidenced at a distance, and what are the methodological and ethical limits of remote, open source, and narrative-based approaches?
• What does comparison with earlier occupations reveal about what is genuinely new in the present, and what important continuities exist?

Candidates should be prepared to work with contemporary source material, which may include NGO, UN, and monitoring-body reporting, court and tribunal records, government and military documentation, media and open-source materials, remote sensing and geospatial data, and survivor and witness testimony. The Centre's methodological approach is interdisciplinary, and the successful candidate will benefit from training and collaboration across historical, social science, legal, and data science methods, including Earth Observation analysis and the large-scale analysis of survivor narratives. Applicants proposing to work directly with affected or displaced populations should indicate in their proposal how they would approach the associated ethical, safeguarding, and security considerations; proposals that do not depend on access to occupied territory are equally welcome. Relevant language competence should be specified where applicable.

About the Leverhulme Centre for Slavery in War

Nearly 90% of recent armed conflicts have involved some form of slavery. Yet the relationships between slavery and war are little examined and poorly understood, leaving governments, international institutions, and humanitarian actors ill-prepared to prevent, respond, or address deep, long-lasting impacts. In a world facing proliferating conflicts, the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War (LCRSW) is the first overarching and integrative academic initiative dedicated to understanding the complex, pervasive, and persistent slavery-war nexus as it has evolved over the centuries. This dual-site research centre (led by the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham) has been established to shape a new interdisciplinary field of study and a step-change towards the global goal of eliminating forced labour, modern slavery, and human trafficking.

The Centre’s research agenda is structured around four interconnected Research Strands (RS): (Re)conceptualising (RS1), Understanding (RS2), Forecasting (RS3), and Tackling (RS4) slavery in war. Doctoral research projects will be embedded within and across these research strands and their teams, working both individually and as a cohort. Together, they will break down disciplinary silos, integrating methodologies from across the AHRC subject remit—primarily history, literature, law, digital humanities, human geography, philosophy, classics, gender studies, political science, and international studies—with cutting-edge data science techniques, including Earth Observation (EO) data analysis, machine learning, large-scale collation and analysis of survivor narratives, geospatial analysis, future-crafting approaches, and novel simulations known as ‘peace- gaming’. Students will also have opportunities to collaborate with our institutions’ partners around the world, across the policy, practitioner and academic sectors.

The student will be an active member of the Centre's ECR community across both KCL and the University of Nottingham, with opportunities for visiting fellowships, cross institutional collaboration, and participation in the Centre's annual programme of conferences, seminars, and writing workshops.

Details of Award

The award pays up to the UKRI Home Tuition Fees (£5,238 for 2026/27) for PhD students. Please see the UKCISA website for detailed advice on whether you may qualify for Home fees status: Full list of categories for HE in England

The award pays full maintenance for all students. The UKRI Doctoral Stipend for 2026/2027 is £21,805, plus a London Weighting of £2000/year, plus Collaborative Activity funding at a rate of £600/year.

Further details can be found on the UKRI website:

https://www.ukri.org/manage-your-award/studentship-guidance/support-for-ukri-funded-students

The student is eligible to receive an additional Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) during the course of the project

The project can be undertaken on a full-time or part-time basis.

Eligibility

• This studentship is only open to Home applicants.
• To be classed as a home student, candidates must meet the following criteria:
  • Be a UK National (meeting residency requirements), or
  • Have settled status, or o Have pre-settled status (meeting residency requirements), or
  • Have indefinite leave to remain or enter
  • Further guidance can be found here -
    • https://www.ukri.org/wp content/uploads/2021/02/UKRI-030221-Guidance-International-Eligibility Implementation-training-grant-holders-V2.pdf
• We are committed to welcoming applications from students from all backgrounds. We particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian, minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds as they are currently underrepresented at this level in this discipline.
• We require an upper-second class (2:1) honours degree and a Master’s degree at high merit or above in a discipline directly relevant to the PhD (or international equivalent).
• Please see here for the English-language requirements for PhD students in the Department of War Studies (Band B):
  • Postgraduate English language entry requirements | King's College London

Assessment of Applicants

Applicants will be assessed by how well they meet the person specification for this position.

This may include:

• An educational and research background that matches this research project.
• The potential to work effectively and inclusively with a diverse team of people
• The potential to take initiative and manage a dynamic and complex workload.
• The potential to develop expertise in new areas related to this subject.
• A demonstrated interest in and understanding of the proposed area of research, including knowledge of current challenges and opportunities.
• The potential to undertake continuous personal and professional development.
• The potential to communicate ideas and findings, verbally and in writing, clearly and effectively.
• An understanding of relevant research methods.

How to apply

If you have questions about the project or the application process, please contact Kelsey Carthew at crsw@kcl.ac.uk

Applicants should apply at the link button and submit the following no later than 5 pm on 18 October 2026:

• Curriculum vitae
• A personal statement outlining your reasons for pursuing doctoral research at King’s College London
• A research proposal (5-10 pages in length) that explains your proposed area of focus; primary research question; importance and originality of your topic; initial thoughts on methods and potential case studies; and your familiarity with the existing literature and research on this topic.
• A sample of academic writing
• Transcripts of undergraduate and master’s qualifications
• One academic reference

Please submit all materials in English.

Use of AI: While we recognise that AI tools can be useful for certain tasks, your application should reflect your own thinking, research interests, skills, and experience rather than AI generated content. Applications that rely heavily on AI-generated content will not demonstrate the originality, critical thinking, and personal insight expected for doctoral study

Please note, it is the responsibility of applicants to request references from their referees and ensure that they have been received by this deadline. All documents should be submitted in either MS Word or PDF format.

Interviews will be held shortly after the application deadline.

Following the interview, the successful candidate will also need to formally apply to King’s College London and satisfy its admission requirements.