Anthony King read Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He completed an MA in Political Science at the University of Michigan in 1991, before studying for an ESRC-funded PhD in the sociology department at the University of Salford in 1992. Based on fieldwork among Manchester United fans, his doctoral dissertation, ‘The Premier League and the New Consumption of Football’ examined the transformation of English football in the early 1990s. He completed his dissertation in 1995, and was appointed as a lecturer in the Sociology Department at Liverpool University in the same year. In 1997, he moved to the University of Exeter. He was appointed Professor of Sociology in 2006. In January 2016, he left Exeter to take up a position as Professor of War Studies in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. He returned to Exeter to the post of professor of war studies (security and defence) in 2023.
Anthony King is a sociologist who remains heavily influenced by social anthropology. Although his work may be diverse, it is unified by a common interest in contemporary social transformation. His research traces the way specific social groups (be they Manchester United fans, infantry platoons, or divisional headquarters) have adapted through close ethnographic observation and historical comparison. His work on the armed forces explores the social, cultural, and military impact of professionalisation.
He has published widely including eight sole-authored monographs and over eighty research articles. Originally, he worked on the sociology of sport and social theory. Since 2004, he has focused on war and the armed forces. He has published extensively in this field on a number of topics including command, cohesion, urban warfare, AI, gender, commemoration, technology, and counter-insurgency. In 2019, he completed a trilogy on military transformation: The Transformation of Europe’s Armed Forces: from the Rhine to Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2011), The Combat Soldier: infantry tactics and cohesion in the twentieth and twenty-first century (Oxford, 2013), Command: the twenty-first century general (Cambridge, 2019).
His most recent books are Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, revised second edition 2025) and AI, Automation, and War: the rise of a military-tech complex (Princeton 2025). He has held five ESRC research grants. His most recent grant was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2021-24), ‘Urban Warfare: past, present and future’. He is currently preparing an Advanced Research application for the European Research Council on AI and military decision-making.