Armed Forces & Society

About Armed Forces & Society

Armed Forces & Society — Journal Profile

Armed Forces & Society is a quarterly, peer-reviewed academic journal founded in 1974 and published by SAGE Publications. It is the official journal of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, and it holds a founding place in its field: it was the first professional journal devoted to the connection between the military and society approached in an international and interdisciplinary way. Half a century after its founding, it remains the central English-language forum in which sociologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists, economists and legal scholars argue about what armed forces are, whom they serve, how they change, and what their existence does to the societies that raise them.

Identity and bibliographic record

The ISSN pair is confirmed in the post's own record on this site, in OpenAlex — where the title is source S21016770 with ISSN-L 0095-327X — and in SAGE's own catalogue entry, which lists the journal as a quarterly SAGE title under ISSN 0095327X. The ampersand in the title is part of the registered title and should be retained in citations, even though databases variously render the title with the word "and" in running text.

Founding and history

The journal was established in 1974 by Morris Janowitz of the University of Chicago, the sociologist whose work — above all The Professional Soldier — effectively created the modern study of military institutions as social institutions. Janowitz's insight was that an armed force could not be understood from doctrine and hardware alone: recruitment, professional identity, family life, public esteem, political attitudes inside the ranks and the terms on which civilian authority directs the military were all proper objects of social science, and all connected. The journal embodied that programme. The Inter-University Seminar, the scholarly association around Janowitz's circle, provided its institutional home, and the journal became the association's official publication, a relationship that continues under SAGE.

The decades since have given the journal an unusually rich archive to publish from. The move from conscription to all-volunteer forces across Western states, the end of the Cold War and the peacekeeping era, the opening of combat roles to women, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their veterans, the growth of private military and security companies, and the return of large-scale war in Europe each generated literatures that converged on this title. Long-serving editor Patricia M. Shields of Texas State University led the journal through much of its modern period — her 2020 essay on the dynamic intersection of military and society is recommended by SAGE on the journal's own page — and SAGE's current editorial listing names Ori Swed of Texas Tech University as editor-in-chief, with Donald Travis as managing editor. Readers using older listings that still name Shields are seeing the earlier masthead; the transition is a useful reminder to check the journal's own site for the current team before submitting.

Aims and scope

SAGE describes the journal as an interdisciplinary title publishing articles quarterly on civil-military relations, veterans, force effectiveness and diversity, military culture, officer education and training, military institutions, ethics, unit cohesion, military families, peacemaking, privatisation, public opinion and conflict management. Its contributors and editors include political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, legal scholars, historians and economists, as well as specialists in military organisation and strategy and in peacekeeping. The journal is international in scope, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and policy discourse.

Unpacking that list shows the field's structure. Civil-military relations — who controls the military, how militaries influence policy, how democratic oversight works or fails — is the theoretical core inherited from Huntington and Janowitz, and the journal still publishes the debates that core generates. Military sociology in the narrower sense covers the institution from inside: recruitment and retention, cohesion, leadership, families, identity, and the experiences of groups historically excluded from service. The veterans literature follows service members out of uniform into health, employment, politics and memory. Work on gender, race and diversity in the ranks, on military families, and on the ethics of war and of military organisation forms a further large strand, as does comparative work that tests whether findings from the United States — still the most studied case — travel to other countries' forces. Book reviews are a substantial feature, reflecting a field in which monographs matter.

Editorial process and what SAGE reports about it

Unusually among journals of its size, SAGE publishes operating metrics on the journal's homepage, and they are quoted here as publisher-reported figures. The homepage gives a median of 5 days to first decision, 41 days for peer review, 138 days from submission to acceptance and 41 days from acceptance to publication, with an acceptance rate of 12.2 per cent. Those medians describe recent performance as reported by the publisher, not a promise to any individual author, but they tell prospective authors two useful things: desk decisions are fast, and the journal is highly competitive in its choices — roughly one submission in eight is accepted. A manuscript should therefore arrive finished, anonymised for blind review, and plainly framed around the journal's questions, because there is little room, in a process that accepts so few papers, for manuscripts that need the review round to discover their own contribution.

Submissions are made through SAGE's SageTrack system, powered by ScholarOne, at the journal's manuscript submission address (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/afs). SAGE's manuscript guidelines for the journal state that manuscripts are ordinarily expected not to exceed about 26 pages and 8,000 words including tables, figures and references, that manuscripts significantly over the limit may be rejected without review, and that the text must be anonymised, with author names and self-identifying material removed and placed on separate pages. The journal's style follows the American Psychological Association style guide, as directed in its current guidelines; authors should confirm the edition required at the time they submit, because style requirements are among the details publishers update. Submission implies a commitment to publish in the journal if accepted, and authors certify that the work is not under consideration elsewhere.

Indexing and metrics

The journal is covered by Scopus, on which SCImago's record rests, and it is a long-established title in the social-science citation system. Secondary listings of the SCImago record report an SJR value of 0.697 and a Scopus-based h-index of 50, with the journal's best quartile given as Q1 across categories that include Safety Research, Social Sciences (miscellaneous) and Sociology and Political Science. SAGE's own homepage currently displays an Impact Factor of 1.3 with a five-year figure of 1.4. OpenAlex, resolved through the ISSN endpoint to source S21016770, gives a different and complementary picture: 2,944 works, cited 32,063 times in the OpenAlex graph, an h-index of 72 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.62. As always, the two h-index values are not in disagreement about the journal's standing; they count different citing literatures — Scopus's curated set against OpenAlex's wider graph — and each is reported here with its source named so that readers can use the figure their own institution recognises.

For a social-science quarterly founded in 1974, these numbers describe a field-defining rather than a high-volume title. Its most cited articles are the field's landmarks: studies of the military and the family as greedy institutions, of the shift from institutional to occupational models of military service, and of the civil-military problematique after Huntington and Janowitz each carry hundreds of citations in aggregator counts, and they continue to anchor syllabuses. Citation averages in this field will never resemble those of biomedical titles, because the community is smaller and books carry part of the argument; the journal's influence is better read in its longevity, its role as the association's journal, and the way its debates structure research programmes across several disciplines.

Publishing model, open access and charges

Armed Forces & Society is a subscription journal with an optional open access route for individual articles, the standard hybrid pattern for SAGE society titles. OpenAlex does not classify it as a fully open access journal, and a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals for both of its ISSNs returned no record in this check; it should not be described as a DOAJ-listed title. OpenAlex records an article processing charge of 3,650 US dollars for the journal, which corresponds to SAGE's optional open access charge as captured in that dataset; authors should treat that figure as indicative, confirm the current charge and any society-member or institutional-agreement discounts on SAGE's site, and note that publishing by the ordinary subscription route does not itself carry that charge. The journal's archive is also held in JSTOR, which matters for readers at institutions whose SAGE access does not reach back to the 1970s volumes.

Who should submit — and what succeeds

The natural author is a scholar whose question is about the military as an institution in society, whatever their home discipline. Empirical work — surveys of service members, veterans or publics; interview and ethnographic studies of units and families; comparative case studies of reform, integration or oversight — sits alongside theoretical and historical essays, provided each speaks to the journal's continuing conversations. Work that merely uses military data to answer a question of no interest beyond its home discipline, campaign history with no social or political analysis, and purely doctrinal or technical military writing all fit less well; the journal's readers expect the social-science move of connecting evidence to institution, society or policy. Given the reported acceptance rate, the framing pages matter disproportionately: name the debate, state what the field currently believes, and show precisely where the new evidence or argument changes it.

Authors should also write for the journal's genuinely comparative readership. A study of one country's force should explain what readers working on other countries should take from it, and terms, ranks and institutions that are obvious at home should be glossed for an international audience. Studies involving serving personnel raise access and ethics questions that reviewers will probe — permissions, consent, and the protection of participants inside a hierarchy should be addressed explicitly in the methods, not left to inference.

The field the journal created

To understand what a good submission looks like, it helps to understand the intellectual map the journal has drawn over fifty years. One axis runs between the military and the state: civilian control, military advice to governments, coups and their prevention, defence organisation and the politics of budgets and procurement. A second runs between the military and society at large: public attitudes to war and to the armed forces, media representation, recruitment markets, and the social composition of the ranks. A third runs inside the institution itself: how units build cohesion, how leaders are educated, how families absorb the costs of service, how identity and belonging are formed, and how misconduct, dissent and reform happen. A fourth, growing axis follows people and consequences beyond service: veterans' health and politics, the memory of wars, the legal and ethical frameworks that govern force, and the private and technological actors — contractors, and now autonomous systems — that complicate the older picture of a state monopoly on organised violence.

Most durable contributions sit where two axes cross. A survey of public trust in the military becomes a civil-military relations paper when it asks what that trust licenses governments to do. A study of women in combat roles becomes an institutional paper when it follows effects on cohesion, retention and culture rather than stopping at attitudes. A history of a reform becomes a theoretical paper when it shows which conditions allowed civilians to prevail, or prevented them. Editors and reviewers in this tradition reward authors who know which conversation they are entering, cite the journal's own archive where it is genuinely relevant, and are precise about the limits of their case: findings from a volunteer force in a wealthy democracy do not automatically describe a conscript force, a gendarmerie, or an army that is also a political party and an economic conglomerate.

Special features, debates and the book review tradition

The journal regularly gathers related work into themed groupings — its recent contents include symposia and forums on subjects such as the Afghanistan war, national security and social science, military reserves, military cohesion and women in the military. Such groupings are one way fields take stock of themselves, and they are a useful entry point for new readers who want to see the current state of an argument rather than its state a decade ago. The book review section plays a similar role for monographs, which remain a major form in history, sociology and political science. For doctoral students and early-career researchers, the review pages and the themed forums together offer the fastest reliable survey of what the field is arguing about now, which presses and programmes are producing it, and where the evidential gaps that a dissertation or a first article might fill are actually located.

Reading the journal over time also teaches a methodological lesson. The field's evidence is unusually varied: attitude surveys and personnel records, archives and memoirs, fieldwork in units and bases, legal texts and court decisions, budgets and force statistics. The journal has no single house method, and its standards are those of the method used — a survey paper is judged as survey research, an archive-based paper as history. What unifies successful papers is transparency about access and evidence, a habit worth copying in fields where access to the subject is often negotiated, partial and politically sensitive.

A final practical note concerns timing and audience beyond the academy. Because the journal's questions are live policy questions — recruitment shortfalls, retention, the politics of defence spending, the treatment of veterans — its articles are read in staff colleges, defence ministries and veterans' organisations as well as in universities, and they are cited in policy documents and the press. Authors who keep that second audience in mind, defining institutional terms, avoiding unexplained acronym practice that differs between countries, and stating the policy implication of a finding in plain language where the evidence supports one, will find their work travelling further than the citation counts alone predict.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Armed Forces & Society? Print 0095-327X and online 1556-0848.

Who founded the journal, and when? Morris Janowitz founded it in 1974; it is the official journal of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.

Who publishes it, and how often? SAGE Publications publishes it quarterly.

Who is the editor-in-chief? SAGE's current listing names Ori Swed of Texas Tech University. Older listings name Patricia M. Shields, the journal's long-serving previous editor.

How competitive in its choices is it? SAGE reports an acceptance rate of 12.2 per cent and a median of 5 days to first decision on the journal's homepage; both figures are publisher-reported.

Is it an open access journal? It is a subscription journal with an optional paid open access route for individual articles; it is not a fully open access or DOAJ-listed title in the sources checked.

Sources and verification

This profile rests on SAGE's journal pages for Armed Forces & Society (scope description, sponsoring association, current editorial team, homepage metrics including impact factor, decision times and acceptance rate, and manuscript guidelines including length, anonymisation and the SageTrack submission route), on the post's own saved record on this site (title, slug, ISSNs and publisher), on OpenAlex source S21016770 resolved through the ISSN endpoint (works, citations, h-index, two-year mean citedness, recorded APC and society link), on SCImago-derived secondary listings for the SJR, Scopus-based h-index and quartiles, attributed as aggregator figures, and on a Directory of Open Access Journals search by ISSN, which returned no record. Historical details — the 1974 founding by Morris Janowitz and the journal's standing as the first professional journal in its field — are as given in the journal's standard reference listings and are consistent with SAGE's presentation of the title.