Allow us to start with a fast digital tour via a bodily house: the floor ground of the British Museum in London. Turning left from the primary entrance, you will see your self within the galleries that home artefacts from historical Greece and Rome and the traditional Close to East. There are marble statues, remnants of temples and tombs, nice sculptural reliefs, items of armour and weaponry, painted vases, and gadgets of jewelry, amongst many different objects. In every single place you look, from the carved stone panels that after adorned palaces in Nimrud and Nineveh, to Greek temple friezes, to home pots and pans, you may see spears bristling, swords drawn, archers flexing their bows, chariots driving into battle, and infantry and cavalry, males and legendary creatures, locked in mortal fight. Some warfare useless are mourned, others are triumphed over; captives are marched in columns, whereas gods of warfare are invoked. There are additionally scenes of leisure – looking, feasting, music-making – and glimpses of civic, spiritual and home life removed from the battlefield. However you’ll wrestle to search out any self-conscious representations of peace or peace-building on show, past some restricted narratives of battle decision inherent in photos of victory or celebrations of conquest. Guests rapidly turn out to be literate within the iconography of warfare and violence, and gadgets in a number of rooms be part of forces to inform a narrative that pulls compelling connections between beneficial gods, sturdy political management, navy drive, and neighborhood prosperity. In contrast, concepts of peace – what it regarded like, the way it was skilled, and the way it was made – stay blurred, out of focus, arduous to visualise.
This isn’t just because lots of the artefacts on show in these galleries mythologise warfare or amplify top-down types of conflict-resolution and some great benefits of belligerent management. For hundreds of years, the curation of those artefacts has allowed elite views, geopolitics and an obsession with empire to dominate, consistent with wider developments in historic storytelling. Info board after data board focuses our consideration on these in energy, on threats to their sovereignty, on shifting territorial boundaries, and on tales of imperial enlargement or decline, constructing an image of human historical past during which ‘nice civilisations’ lurch from one battle to the following. As an illustration:
‘The age of empire’ (Early New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, c. 1550-1295 BC): ‘Ahmose II of Thebes defeated the Hyksos at their northern capital Avaris, reuniting the nation. Conquests by his successors made Egypt the dominant empire of the traditional world…’
‘Greek and Roman rule in Egypt’ (Greco-Roman interval, 332 BC – AD 395): ‘After his triumphant entry into Egypt, Alexander the Nice pursued his conquest of the Persian Empire…’
Of in-between instances – warfare’s aftermath, the lull between clashes, intervals of peace – we are able to see remarkably little. References to commerce, agriculture and inventive manufacturing are usually framed in relation to warfare (as threatened by it, or as by-products of imperial enlargement); and the work that people and communities did to navigate, keep away from or get well from the conflicts of their period is hardly touched upon. We can’t place all of the blame on the artefacts themselves; alternatives have been missed within the curation and communication course of to lift questions concerning the habits of visualising warfare which these objects promote and to discover historical experiences and discourses of peace.
This isn’t an odd quirk both of antiquity or of this specific museum. Within the 21st century, we’re surrounded by photos and narratives of warfare, however uncovered to far fewer representations or discussions of peace. It’s not the case that such representations don’t exist; somewhat, they don’t seem to be framed or foregrounded in ways in which affect our consciousness as a lot as narratives of warfare do. As John Gittings (amongst others) has noticed, in case you stroll into the common excessive road bookshop you’ll possible discover a ‘navy historical past’ part, however no equal shelf house dedicated to (say) the politics of peace. Whereas many bookshops inventory each reality and fiction titles that replicate on totally different elements of peace and peace-making – from inside peace to worldwide negotiations – they’re normally dispersed throughout totally different sections, and never simply seen, accessible or promoted in the best way that clusters of books on warfare are. A fast browse for movies on-line will flip up lots of beneath the fashionable class ‘warfare movie’, a best-selling style that constructs and deconstructs warfare in many various guises, making it really feel shut, acquainted, identified (whereas socialising us into viewing it for and as leisure). In contrast, movies that narrate post-conflict restoration, reconciliation, harmonious dwelling, future aspirations, friendship throughout divides, and different such elements of discovering or making peace, shouldn’t have a recognisable classification that unites or amplifies them. Scattered throughout comedy, interval drama, motion journey, fantasy, science fiction and romance, they get us desirous about all kinds of phenomena, however they’re hardly ever produced or marketed in ways in which convey peace itself into focus. ‘Peace artwork’ and ‘peace journalism’ are extra established endeavours; even so, they don’t have the identical centuries-old traditions behind them as ‘warfare artwork’ and ‘warfare reporting’, and so they haven’t gained as a lot traction amongst commissioners or shoppers. Frank Möller and David Shim make related factors about warfare/peace pictures. Why does this matter? One objection to establishing ‘peace movies’ as a significant class is that the vary of works we would classify beneath that label is just too nebulous, too tough to find out. Arguably, nevertheless, one purpose for that is that we shouldn’t have sturdy traditions of peace storytelling, which might assist us recognise ‘peace’ after we see it and make us extra ‘peace literate’. The extra we focus on and discover an idea, the extra alternatives we have now to grasp it; however the reverse can be true. The media that form us individually and collectively hardly ever get us wrestling with peace as an idea; because of this, we wrestle to visualise or grasp it, and so inform fewer tales about it, and so the cycle goes on.
Our Museum of Peace goals to make a modest contribution to wider efforts to render peace and peace-making extra seen, extra mentioned, and higher understood. An output of the broader Visualising Struggle and Peace challenge, primarily based on the College of St Andrews, this digital exhibition house has been designed and developed by a pupil analysis group, mentored by Alice König and Jenny Oberholzter. The challenge is grounded in an understanding of narratives as world-building. The tales we inform, the photographs we share, and the songs we sing replicate the worlds we reside in; however in addition they assist to form them, by impacting how people and teams suppose, really feel and behave. For us, visualising warfare or peace goes nicely past merely ‘picturing’ both: it entails evoking, figuring, engendering and in the end realising them: narrating warfare and peace into (sure methods of) being. Analysis on this ‘suggestions loop’ between narrative and actuality has been superior by a number of latest scholarly developments, together with the ‘visible flip’ within the research of world politics, the ‘narrative flip’ in Worldwide Relations (from novels to TV to music movies and past), rising consideration to ‘the politics of the on a regular basis’, and advances in important feminist and postcolonial approaches. Drawing on all of those, our intention is to harness the facility of story-sharing to light up totally different habits of visualising peace and their affect (precise or potential) on how it’s skilled, promoted, created and sustained. Our challenge is each disruptive of entrenched habits and generative of recent or other ways of desirous about peace. By juxtaposing a myriad of various manifestations of peace, we intention to query, problem and stretch assumptions and interpretative frameworks; and we hope that our array of ‘displays’ not solely helps to make peace extra seen and extra broadly understood but in addition extra tangible and realisable within the on a regular basis.
The Ethics of Visualising Peace
In collating and curating narratives of peace from totally different intervals, locations and contexts, we have now tried to be conscious of a number of moral pitfalls. Peace, or no less than the phrase as utilized by some, isn’t essentially a great factor for a lot of, in apply. Requires peaceable options in response to violent state-sponsored actions are tough to take critically when (as an illustration) peaceable protestors are sentenced to loss of life in Iran. All around the globe, there are spoken and unstated calls for that protests and activism should conform to an ideal imaginative and prescient of peace in an effort to be taken critically; equally, there’s common, widespread insistence that people who find themselves victimized ought to reply peacefully or be deemed unworthy of justice. Historical past is affected by examples of actions resorting to arms regardless of their non-violent roots (Cobb: 2015); and we have now seen the dangers of inflexible adherence to pacifist positions not simply over the previous few many years however fairly actually in the course of the size of the Visualising Peace challenge to date.
Because the spring time period of 2022 started, Russian troops massed exterior the Ukrainian border. Younger folks, usually the identical age as lots of the college students concerned on this challenge, joined navy models to assist defend the Ukrainian state. Many would die, have died, are dying and can die. They won’t have the prospect to complete their college phrases, to have first jobs after a level, and to mature within the ways in which our group of scholars have and can. Discussions of what it means to be a pacifist, to refuse to have interaction in acts of violence and extra had been thrown into harsh aid in a rustic only a three-hour flight away. And this has been true not just for potential troopers. As St Andrews alumna Darya Tsymbalyuk and her colleague Iryna Zamuruieva have written: ‘As feminists, we’re important of militarisation; however we consider that pacifism will kill and that Russia’s warfare crimes have left us with no possibility… however to marketing campaign for extra navy help to have the ability to defend ourselves and survive.’
Comparable conflicts have been on-going elsewhere on the earth. The mixture of web entry, social media utilization, and focused Ukrainian engagement with the English-speaking public has meant that this warfare has been unfolding in very seen methods, whereas different occasions such because the warfare and famine in Yemen, the aftermath of the American exit from Afghanistan, or the day by day degradation of life beneath Israeli Occupation haven’t. The highlight on Ukraine, versus all the different conflicts, can and must be interrogated at size. Nonetheless, for a UK-based analysis group it provided a beneficial, concrete instance of what usually summary concepts would possibly imply within the life of somebody close by. Watching this warfare unfold received us exploring ‘on a regular basis peace’, pockets of peace, and care and love amid battle, amongst different matters; however it additionally noticed us questioning beliefs, projections and fantasies of peace, pacifism, and the way these ideas may be weaponized. Pacifism as a set of beliefs holds enchantment; pacifism as a apply within the face of an invasion might make one query its foundational rules.
What does it imply to request that individuals beneath navy occupation in Gaza or Mariupol reply peacefully as they arrive beneath fireplace, condemning kids for throwing rocks? What does ‘peace’ imply when legislation enforcement breaks into houses at Moist’suwet’en with axes and chainsaws, telling residents that they’re disturbing the peace? When protesters are advised to disassemble in Edinburgh or London or Portland and met with arrest or violence? If we embody solely these tales and pictures of peace that happen in sure fashionable canons, or within the historical past books we discovered from at school, the narratives provided are of questionable worth; historical past is written by the victor, and most of the time, that victor turned the victor via drive of arms. The wrestle for equality, justice, restitution, or reparation could also be deemed an offense towards peace, undermining the established order within the identify of chaos. However the name, ‘No Justice, No Peace’ reminds us that with out justice, no true, lasting peace is feasible; with out justice, ‘peace’ isn’t peace for everybody, nor ought to or not it’s. Time would possibly enable for Fact and Reconciliation committees and a re-evaluation of occasions, however even with cautious thought, we might overlook an vital query: Whose peace are we permitting to take centre stage?
A Kaleidoscope of Views
When creating our digital Museum of Peace, it was vital to not merely employees it with a variety of researchers and belief that that may be sufficient, however to be well-aware of our collective positionality. The members of our pupil and employees group come from many nations, ethnic teams, backgrounds, religions, and socioeconomic lessons, however we’re nonetheless very a lot positioned inside a privileged house in Western, particularly British academia. The methods during which most of us have skilled and been educated privileges sure views, and that is one thing we can’t undo and mustn’t deny. That stated, in being conscious of it, we are able to tackle our inherent biases to a sure extent. Sitting inside an instructional establishment, we all know that we are sometimes primed to hunt out some sources, and never others; for that purpose, we have now made a aware effort to take heed to voices past the academy and to discover representations of peace in much less ‘mainstream’ media. Our museum options graffiti, kids’s drawings, music, dance, on-line video games, yogic practices, autoethnography, cyber activism, environmental actions, and trend, alongside prayer, poetry, movie, novels, historical past, political debate and scholarship. As we proceed so as to add new entries, we are attempting to make sure broader illustration throughout genders, generations, areas, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Inevitably, this stays a piece in progress.
We’ve got additionally tried to make a advantage out of particular person positionality and disciplinary variety. The coed researchers concerned in creating our Museum of Peace had been drawn from totally different year-groups and topic areas (Arabic, Artwork Historical past, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, Movie Research, Historical past, IR, Psychology, Social Anthropology and Sustainable Improvement). This led to fascinating classroom conversations, as concepts and approaches in a single topic prompted us to rethink ideas, theoretical frameworks or methodologies in one other. For instance, the ‘native flip’ in Worldwide Relations helped researchers in Classics and Historical past to interrogate the top-down, elite, male-gendered views from which peace and peace-building have historically been studied of their topic areas, and to excavate extra vernacular experiences of peace and peace-making prior to now. On the identical time, developments in English and Movie Research which foreground particular person storytelling and personalised viewpoints inspired researchers primarily based in IR to decouple the research of peace from macro politics, armed battle and ‘safety’ and to discover the entire spectrum from inner- to geopolitical peace.
In addition to making us extra ‘bias-aware’ in choosing and curating our chosen visualisations of peace, these exchanges led to our growth of The Visualising Peace Library – a web based useful resource designed to encourage extra data change, not solely between totally different disciplines but in addition between academia and apply. Whereas teachers undoubtedly play an vital function in shaping our understanding of and approaches to peace, the world of college analysis can typically really feel indifferent from sensible societal considerations, and peace practitioners can discover important concept tough to entry or implement on the bottom (Ragandang: 2021). Our museum goals to bridge the divide, doing work of worth for a lot of totally different sorts of customer. Embracing the idea of ‘citizen scholarship’ (analysis that embraces the porous relationship between scholarship and society, just like ‘citizen science’), we use our digital exhibition house to convey various views right into a shared, accessible area, within the hope of producing extra knowledge-exchange and dialogue between (e.g.) teachers, peace campaigners, house scientists, navy strategists, lecturers, journalists, artists, sport designers, museum curators, and lots of others within the wider world. Whereas Peace Museums do exist across the globe, such because the Worldwide Peace Museum or the Kyoto Museum for World Peace, entry to them is essentially restricted to those that both reside within the space or have the means to journey. Nonetheless massive, their bodily dimensions additionally set a restrict to the quantity, vary and sorts of supplies that may be on show. Our on-line platform not solely democratizes entry however invitations the customer to turn out to be a co-curator with us, by providing alternatives for suggestions and interplay. As you’ll discover as you browse our displays, every entry ends with a set of questions, designed to immediate replicate and elicit responses.
As our mission assertion underlines:
Our intention is to not promote anybody specific imaginative and prescient of peace… Our intention is to spark extra dialog about what peace ‘seems like’ to every of us, the place it may be discovered, how it may be promoted, the way it will get represented, and what peace-making and peace-keeping really contain. We expect that speaking about totally different manifestations of peace is a crucial step in empowering everybody to play a component in fostering it, irrespective of who they’re or the place they arrive from.
Every contributor to our museum has added visualisations of peace primarily based on their very own areas of experience and curiosity – from top-down to grassroots, utopian to dystopian, belligerent to pacifist, geopolitical to private, aftermath to futures pondering. Private, inventive tasks (graphic design, pencil sketches, inventive writing, and interpretative dance) sit alongside evaluation of different folks’s or organisation’s visualisations (as an illustration, Pentagon Peace Buddies; Quaker philosophies; Padre Steve’s Christmas Journey; the Inexperienced Mosul Initiative; and Emily Mayhew’s Hope in a Jar). Take, for instance, Marios Diakourtis’ black-and-white drawings, impressed by poems that replicate on the wrestle to search out peace after compelled displacement. As he explains, ‘Picasso used the liberty and abstraction of modernism to point out the complexity, chaos and atrocities of warfare; however I feel that peace may be simply as complicated and convoluted, therefore I selected to observe the same fashion.’ His black and white color scheme is designed to evoke but in addition problem black-and-white conceptions of peace as merely the binary reverse of warfare; certainly, he has packed symbolism into his drawings which intention to point out that experiences of peace and warfare can by synchronous. As he places it, ‘That is precisely how all of the poets I’ve learn visualise peace for refugees and compelled migrants: as liminal figures that mediate between battle and peace.’
One other merchandise in our museum options kids’s views on peace. By the point we attain maturity, we have now usually been socialised into very specific methods of desirous about peace. Residing within the UK, for instance, folks develop up studying about – and celebrating – Armistice Day, ‘Victory in Europe Day’ and different occasions and anniversaries linked with the tip of the First and Second World Wars. Concepts of peace characteristic within the lyrics of fashionable music; and youngsters learn books and watch movies reminiscent of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Magnificence and the Beast, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, tales which finish fortunately, with battle decision and calm, after violence and dysfunction. Alongside protection of latest conflicts, they could have have seen footage of anti-war protests, with an array of peace symbols from Picasso’s iconic dove to the ‘peace and love’ signal designed within the Fifties for the Marketing campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). And so they might have heard requires world peace or neighborhood concord in spiritual contexts. However how do kids themselves think about, perceive and describe peace themselves? The smells, tastes and sounds which they talked about in conversations with our researchers made it clear how strongly the kids we interviewed linked peace with two issues: residence and happiness. Lollipops, Phish Meals ice cream, macaroni, and pie… consolation meals and treats. Hugs with their household had been talked about a number of instances. They talked a little bit of peace as one thing quiet and contemplative: for instance, a number of described being curled up with a e-book as a peaceable expertise, whereas one other described sitting nonetheless within the backyard at night time whereas swifts swooped by. However in addition they chatted excitedly about trampoline time, doing entrance flips, going to theme parks and enjoying with pals as peaceable actions. For them, peace was virtually synonymous with the components that make up a cheerful, safe childhood. In a nutshell, ‘peace is on a regular basis enjoyable’.
Between them, our various museum entries assist us rethink the connections we frequently make between peace and nature, peace and love, peace and justice, and peace and girls, and peace and safety, amongst many different pairings. The result’s a smorgasbord of various ideas, mental framings and imaginaries – native, regional and transnational. Individually, all displays transcend the tropes, clichés and symbols historically related to peace; and collectively, as they work together and mood one another, they problem dominant ideas, dismantle long-standing frameworks and push us to contemplate visualisations of peace and mechanisms of peace-building which can be usually missed. The construction of the museum encourages guests to discover open-mindedly, with out a sense of trajectory or hierarchy; and thru a mixture of deliberate cross-references (through tags and hyperlinks) and unintentional juxtapositions, the mosaic turns into a kaleidoscope, with new contrasts and connections coming into focus each time you are taking one other look. In consequence, every go to to the museum represents an ongoing means of important discovery of presumably limitless conceptualisations. They aren’t to be taken didactically; they merely provide a gap to additional interrogation and understanding. We don’t want this challenge to be seen because the be-all and end-all of how one ought to or might visualize peace. Quite, it’s a metaphorical name to (lay down) arms in a collaborative, open-ended exploration of prevailing habits and other ways of picturing, framing, evoking and engendering peace, via many lenses.
References
Bleiker, Roland. (2012). Aesthetics and World Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bleiker, Roland, ed. (2018). Visible World Politics. New York: Routledge.
Cobb, Charles Jr (2015). This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Weapons Made the Civil Rights Motion Doable. New York, NY: Primary Books.
Gittings, John. (2018). The Superb Artwork of Peace. Paths to Peace in a New Age of Struggle. Oxford. Blackwells.
LaRocca, David. (2015). The Philosophy of Struggle Movies. Kentuchy: College Press of Kentuchy.
Möller, Frank. (2019). Peace Images. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Möller, Frank and Shim, David. (2019). ‘Visions of Peace in Worldwide Relations’, Worldwide Research Views 20.3, 246-64.
Ragandang, Primitivo Cabanes. (2021). ‘What are they writing for? Peace analysis as an impermeable metropole’, Peacebuilding 10:3, 265-277.
Additional Studying on E-Worldwide Relations
