How to Get Published in Security Studies or History

Francis J. Gavin takes on academic writing. Security Studies:

For the security studies crowd, academic writing was too often crafted like a terse but bold legal brief, with the key points presented in outline form, the argument simple, sharp, and often combative. “The long-held conventional wisdom about subject X, offered by the leading and misguided school of thought/methodology/paradigm, is embarrassingly wrong. My powerful, parsimonious theory upends what we thought we knew about war/conflict/street cleaning/circus clown management. The article will proceed in three parts. The first will demonstrate why the collective brainpower of the competing paradigm/methodology has been so breathtakingly mistaken for so long. Part two will lay out my all-powerful theory, mention canonical strawman texts that are oft cited but never read, while burying key caveats in long, discursive footnotes. Part three will provide an overly simplistic historical sketch based on a large data set that aggregates a disparate array of events that have little to do with each other but will be fitted neatly into a 2×2 matrix. I will conclude by emphasizing how embracing my one-size-fits-all conceptual lens and powerful, novel methodology/theory will transform the discipline and lead to smarter policy, less stupidity, and brighter teeth and fresher breath.” 

And History:

The style of writing in scholarly history journals was much different. Articles often started with an obscure, strange story from the past that that would “illuminate a puzzle” and “expose lacunae” by exploring a previously unstudied event, person, or group of people, phenomena, or household commodity that no one had ever bothered to investigate before. “The fact that all the bakers in this small, 17th-century French village were left-handed and subsisted only on salted beet roots may seem curious, even inexplicable to us today, but in truth it revealed something important about the powerful if hidden hegemonic sociocultural, socioeconomic, and neo-colonial structures that formed the foundation of the early modern world.” The article would then highlight a previously undiscovered archive, a “treasure trove” of diaries or municipal records, or uncollected trash that “sheds new light” even as it “problematizes, decenters, and complicates” our understanding of key parts of the world. It would conclude by saying that the history we thought we knew was more complex, more nuanced, and began much earlier than we once thought, while declaring that more research — indeed, a whole subfield — should be devoted to explaining this once-obscure issue or group.