The School of Classics’ Visualising Peace project has grown out of the Alice König and Nicolas Wiater’s long-running Visualising War project. In studying narratives of conflict and the impact which they have on how people understand, imagine and approach conflict, Dr König has become interested in the ways in which people narrate war’s aftermath and conflict transformation. This has led her to look at different habits of visualising peace and how those habits might influence our mindsets and behaviours. In 2021, she designed a new module – as part of the University of St Andrews’ Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) programme – to involve students directly in her research. Over the past 2.5 years, 44 students from 20 different academic disciplines (Arabic, Art History, Biology, Classics, Comparative Literature, Economics, English, Film Studies, French, Geography, German, International Relations, Italian, Management, Medieval History, Modern History, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Anthropology, Sustainable Development) and a range of different year groups have taken part.
The project’s key research questions
- What recurring stories do individuals and communities tell about war’s aftermath, conflict resolution, peace and peace-building in art, text, film, photography, news reports, museums, music, sculpture, gaming, and other such media?
- What (if anything) makes any given narrative identifiable as a ‘peace story’? And are narratives of peace always constructed in relation to narratives of war?
- Whose narratives or ideas of peace dominate in different parts of the world, and why?
- What role can peace-storytelling play in peace-building?
- How can we use storytelling in different genres, media and contexts to deepen understanding of peace and support peacebuilding around the world?
The feedback loop between narrative and reality
Traditionally, peace and conflict studies have tended to focus on realia: on relations between states and diplomatic processes; on political, social or economic drivers of conflict; strategic decision-making, technological preparedness and tactical manoeuvres; on how military campaigns have played out; on aspects of aftermath such as casualty figures and devastated infrastructure; on peace negotiations, post-conflict justice, rehabilitation and reconciliation processes. However, all aspects of conflict and post-conflict recovery are pursued through, experienced via and influenced by storytelling. Strategic planning, for instance, is an exercise in both imagination (the visualisation of successful future outcomes) and persuasion (of fellow military personnel, and of the wider public/press); and it is often shaped by dominant accounts of prior strategy-making. Interstate negotiations are mediated via words and images, as the parties involved evoke past friendship or enmity and figure future relations. While most conflicts are driven by real factors, such as scarcity of resources, political oppression or social injustice, no co-ordinated use of force by one group against another is ever possible without story-sharing in a range of media that unites, enlists and inspires potential combatants and their wider community, to the point that enough are willing to support and resource this costly endeavour. The pursuit of justice in the aftermath of conflict relies on the sharing and weighing of multiple testimonies; and reconciliation and recovery are facilitating by listening and dialogue.
For this reason, a key premise at the heart of the Visualising War and Peace project is that analysis of war- and peace-storytelling is just as important to our understanding and prevention of armed conflict as the study of historic facts and current capabilities. This is because stories are world-building. Narratives of war and peace do not simply reflect reality: they help to shape it, by influencing how we think, feel and behave. In fact, there is a constant feedback loop between the tales we tell and the pictures we paint and the decisions we take and the things we do. Our habits of understanding, imagining and describing peace determine our approach to securing, preserving, building or neglecting it.
For the Visualising Peace research team, then, studying narratives of peace and conflict is not simply about analysing different storytelling habits in verse, or art, or speech or song. It is a project with real-world applications. In studying past and present peace stories, they aim to raise awareness of the powerful discourses and ideologies which they draw on, bind together and generate over time, which influence us all as individuals, institutions and societies. They want to encourage others to notice and question the kinds of peace stories which they have encountered, to consider whose visions of peace they promote, and what alternative visions might be worth considering. They want to underline the responsibility that we all have, as consumers, producers and sharers of peace stories, for future habits of understanding, figuring, realising and enacting it. And they also hope – through a range of outreach projects with military personnel, museum curators, game designers, theatre-makers, musicians, visual artists, conflict photographers, journalists, NGOs, diplomats, peace educators, and youth campaigners – to build capacity in individuals and groups to study and harness narratives of peace to help prevent or mitigate against the effects of future conflict.
Outputs and Outcomes
While sharing a set of overarching research questions, Visualising Peace team members have worked individually and in small groups over the past 2.5 years to stretch the project in many different directions, developing a wide range of impactful outputs. Individuals have had the opportunity to identify and pursue specialisms of particular interest to them within peace studies; to experiment with alternative methodologies; to disseminate their research to different audiences; to translate research into action; and to develop as citizen scholars, applying their academic work to real-world problems. Evolving from learners into experts and instructors, students have contributed new cross-disciplinary perspectives to peace studies across multiple disciplines (from Classics to cell biology) and enhanced ‘peace literacy’ in a range of public and educational settings. Going well beyond traditional classroom practices, they have published podcasts, academic articles, blogs and reports; developed teaching resources for use in primary and secondary schools, an online ‘library’ of multi-disciplinary peace studies for academics and practitioners, and a virtual Museum of Peace. They have also hosted public debates, focus groups, competitions and exhibitions, to share their work with diverse audiences. This range of innovative, public-facing assessments has enabled them to develop skills and confidence as researchers, educators and peace activists and stretched their understanding what academic work can involve.
This project’s Museum of Peace, podcast series and the Visualising Peace Library have been set on UG and PG reading lists for politics and peacebuilding courses at other universities (King’s College London, Glasgow, Swansea) and used by teachers in various school settings (St Leonards School, Kingussie High School, Kirkwall High School, Nueva School, California), testifying to the reach of the team’s work; and as part of their ongoing impact on peace education and teacher training in secondary and tertiary contexts, Alice and three students were invited to contribute an article to the journal of the Association for Citizenship Teaching (issue 59, 2024: ‘AI, Elections and Citizenship: what is the future of democratic participation?’). Dr König’s original research on ancient discourses of peace has not only provided a starting point for new enquiries in many different disciplines; it has itself been transformed by the questions, findings, methodologies and outputs of the rest of the team.
Read more about the Visualising Peace team and explore their research and growing portfolio of outputs by browsing this website. Follow them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. You are also welcome to email Dr König directly at vispeace@st-andrews.ac.uk.
St Andrews Classics 