Our history - RUHM

The Journal's History

 

In the first months of 2012, Félix Gil Feito launched a project which he had been pondering for a long time, one that should fill a serious historiographic gap in the Spanish-speaking world. And so, Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar (RUHM) was born, the first one in Spain and Latin America with a clear vocation to approach war studies from modern perspectives while adhering to the most demanding scientific standards. Hence, it is no coincidence that, in the last decade, other utterly important initiatives of academic or informative nature have equally emerged in its wake. For this reason, it would be unfair to say that the father of the idea was alone: a number of renowned researchers, all of them leaders in the field of military history, endorsed the project and contributed to its launch. The endorsement, experience and valuable advice of two people well aware of the innovative potential of this field must thus be acknowledged, so we thank professors Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas and Fernando Puell de la Villa. Each in their own way, they have both been pioneers and referents of what today is a historiographic trend and a school which unites the two shores of the Ibero-American Atlantic, a reality largely due to the work carried out by the RUHM in its first decade of life.

 

The first call for submissions was in March 2012, and in the first days of June that year appeared the first issue of the RUHM. That first issue included works from different perspectives with varied temporal and thematic arcs, because such has been the spirit that animates this project from its very beginning: to create a meeting space for colleagues partially or fully dedicated to any aspects related to war studies as seen from different periods and disciplines, while at the same time promoting exchanges within a necessarily broad and transversal perspective.

 

In this sense, there are two basic convictions that have guided us to the present day: on the one hand, the fundamental and undoubted importance of war in the evolution of human societies since its very appearance -which alone would justify a specialised journal focused on the problematics and intricacies of war and the military-; on the other hand, the enormous vitality and strength of the international academic production and debates related to studies of armed conflicts and the military world. As young researchers connected to the global reality, we aspired to transmit all this in our most familiar spaces of academic socialisation, in our classrooms or in our own research, while at the same time creating a meeting space to connect, collect and systematise the ensemble of interesting projects that had been carried out for years in the Spanish-speaking world.

 

As a publication, we have always had a firm commitment to the reality of our time. In this sense, we have not renounced a perspective that may be local, regional or national -which is key when it comes to situating studies in Arts and Social Sciences-, but neither that of an already globalised research world directed toward increasingly more comparative, transnational and global approaches. At the end of the day, such has been humankind's scope of action, and therefore the scenery of history: local, but interconnected in multiple ways on a global level.

 

Precisely because of that, this journal is inspired by its vocation and fully transatlantic nature, which manifests in the active participation of colleagues from different schools and traditions in the Hispanic and European academic world, many of whom work or have worked in research centres all over the world. Hence also the attempt to import some of the main international academic debates and the wish to enrich them from our own coordinates and study cases, which have a lot to say in the international academic arena and the collective production of critical, useful and complex knowledge of armed confrontations and the military world.

 

The road up to here has not been easy, but today the project is fully consolidated, installed in different traditions and historiographic spaces and in constant search of new horizons.

 

At the beginning of 2014, with the journal already running, Miguel Alonso Ibarra and David Alegre Lorenz, two historians full of ideas, joined the hard core of the project, contributing their youth and enthusiasm and working as co-editors from 2015 to present. In those years, the internationalisation of the project received a definitive boost, with the regular appearance of monographs on reference topics in then-current academic debates, almost invariably including articles in English or Portuguese, the other two vehicular languages of the RUHM, in its effort to promote relationships with other closely related academic and cultural realities. New sections were promoted, such as the one dedicated to the translation of high impact papers in the aforementioned fields.

 

The idea was to actively contribute to knowledge transfers, while at the same time making outstanding methodological and interpretative contributions originally appeared in other languages available to the Spanish-speaking public. Sections present from the beginning were also more clearly defined, such as the one dedicated to reviews, which we consider as a living space of the utmost importance for capturing, analysing and divulging the latest historiographic interests and advances in the realm of social and cultural history of war and armed institutions.

 

One of the most arduous endeavours we have embarked on in the last five years has been the attempt to gain our own permanent space in war studies since Antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the Early Modern period. To this day, taking into account the variety and quality of our content, we may say that we have succeeded, since issue after issue we bring together colleagues working on different fields and periods and try to make the academic world aware of the need to break with the compartmentalisation and hyperspecialisation of knowledge.

 

This has benefited the public, the authors, the journal team and the RUHM itself, as has already been commented on several occasions. Between the current year and the next, the tenth anniversary of the RUHM, the solidity and continuity of the project will be reasserted with new monographs on Modern, Ancient and Medieval history, together with other texts which will bring together specialists on different periods around a given topic. Our spirit has not changed. The plurality of voices that resonate in the RUHM has only given it added value and pushed it closer to its foundational goals.

 

There are many people who have left a lasting impression on the project, without whose efforts it would be impossible to understand it in its current dimension. In the field of Antiquity, we only have words of gratitude for Isaías Arrayás and Carlos Heredia, who have accompanied us since 2015; in the field of Medieval history, Mario Lafuente has been our eyes and our guide; a year later came Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández, who has given us constant support for any issues related to Early Modern history; nor can we forget the central role of Daniel Aquillué as advisor to the team in all matters related to the Spanish 19th century, often forgotten by Spanish contemporists. Last but not least, Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira, co-editor from the beginning of 2016 to mid-2019, occupies a remarkable place in our history, and we will always be thankful for his commitment to the RUHM until we decided to part ways.

 

Undoubtedly, the academic world in Argentina is where the growth and projection of the RUHM has become most visible, with a continued flow of valuable works from colleagues based in Argentinian universities and research centres. The key to it has allegedly been to count with two international references such as Alejandro Rabinovich and Germán Soprano, who joined our team in 2015. The most visible evidence of the work that we have carried out together can be found in some of the monographs from the last two years, which bring together colleagues with affiliation centres located in points as geographically distant from one another as Colombia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Italy. The new members of the team in 2020, including María Inés Tato, Esteban Pontoriero or Patricia Bou Pérez, allow us to believe that the RUHM will remain to be a meeting point for experts on different epochs on a transoceanic level. Thus, we can only thank our colleagues who from Latin America, Spain and Portugal have placed their trust in us, and remind them that the RUHM will always aspire to be a shared home for all those who dedicate themselves, in one way or another, to the study of war, violence or the world of armed institutions and public order.

 

The professional and scientific nature of the journal has never been an obstacle to address the broadest possible audience, as we are aware of the wide interest that arouses everything having to do with our chosen topics of study, because this is indeed a project that embraces open access to knowledge. In this sense, for the last three years we have devoted ourselves to the dissemination of our content on social media, especially on Twitter, where we strive every day to attract new talent, interact with other colleagues and initiatives and, above all, to make our work known. We firmly believe in the need to provide more complex and responsible views around crucial and disputed realities such as war and the world of armed institutions in general. That is why we cannot ignore this central dimension of our work as teachers, researchers, and academic popularisers. Therefore, the members of the RUHM team will always be willing to collaborate with all initiatives aimed at broadening the public's knowledge of history.

 

However, nothing would have been possible without the authors who have placed their trust in the RUHM throughout these years, submitting their works for evaluation and making them known on our pages. Given the delicate and complex nature of the process as a whole, we have tried to carry it out with the most familiar, detail-oriented and horizontal treatment possible, avoiding the coldness and distance that is usual in this type of academic spaces. The final result, as can be seen by the seventeen issues already hosted on our website, is only the tip of the iceberg of the hard work by the authors, and also -and this is a key point- by the reviewers who selflessly collaborate with us year after year.

 

Many works fall by the wayside; others reach the final stage after two or three complete evaluation rounds, usually after being reinforced and enriched with the critical evaluations by the RUHM team and external reviewers. Both the current workload -ever larger and more constant due to the number of works in queue- as well as our wish to go further, invite us to believe that the way forward demands a commitment to quality work and an editorial line fostering only the most advanced perspectives. This will result, if anything, in even more demanding and exhaustive criteria aimed for the admission and evaluation of original works which represent clear and novel contributions to the current academic debates.

 

Such will be the reflections that will hallmark the arrival of the RUHM to its tenth year of life in 2021, when our 20^thissue will be released. In all that is to come, Alfonso Iglesias Amorín's role, who at the beginning of 2020 joined our team as co-editor -although it is true that he, in one way or another, had been collaborating with us for a long time- will be decisive. A life insurance of sorts, in short, for the continuity of this project, which would be unfeasible without the good harmony and sincere friendship among its members. That was one of the main teachings and contributions given to us by our founder and friend, Félix Gil Feito, who despite leaving the project in mid-2017 has never stopped keeping a friendly eye on us. Today, he works in the world of culture and knowledge as editor of the History section at the publishing house La Esfera de los Libros. However, our paths and initiatives have never ceased to intersect until today, giving birth to a series of new and exciting projects, an irrefutable proof of the valuable and lasting results of our main project.

 

And yet, as we have commented sometimes, none of us could have imagined, just six or seven years ago, that we would go this far, even though all we have achieved is the result of a titanic effort, our thirst for knowledge and our commitment to transparency and radical intellectual honesty. The second decade of the RUHM and its continuity in the medium term will thus depend on us staying loyal to the values that have so far allowed us to grow and be ever better. 

 

Teruel, March 14, 2020