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Visualising War and Peace

Visualising War and Peace
Author: The University of St Andrews
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© 2025 Visualising War and Peace
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How do war stories work? And what do they do to us? Join University of St Andrews historian Alice König and colleagues as they explore how war and peace get presented in art, text, film and music. With the help of expert guests, they unpick conflict stories from all sorts of different periods and places. And they ask how the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and war influence us as individuals and shape the societies we live in.
89 Episodes
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In this episode, Alice interviews Lauren Benton, Professor of History and Law at Yale University. Prof Benton specialises in global legal history and the history of European empires. She has a raft of publications to her name, on the intersection between the British empire and the origins of international law, on piracy and protectionism, and on slavery and colonisation, among other topics.  Her work in this space has involved researching many forms of violence that fall short of full-bl...
In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Beryl Pong, an expert on 20th-century and contemporary war. Beryl is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence. An affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of English, her research is very interdisciplinary, combining literary and historical studies with visual politics and an interest in emerging technologies. Her first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: for the Duration (publi...
In this episode of the Visualising War and Peace podcast, guest-host Zofia Guertin speaks with Prof. Alice König about her work expanding the Visualising War project to include peace studies. In this conversation, Alice unveils the groundbreaking Ancient Peace Studies Network—the first of its kind dedicated to examining how peace was understood, experienced, and represented across different ancient cultures. Discover why peace narratives have received far less scholarly attention than war sto...
In this episode, Zofia Guertin interviews Alice König about her recent research on ancient habits of visualising war and peace.  Alice has recently co-edited a new book with Nicolas Wiater, on ancient conflict narratives, called Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Genres and Media (Routledge 2025). In this podcast episode, Alice introduces the book and discusses some of the themes at the heart of it. In particular, she expl...
In this episode, Alice interviews Professor Marsha Henry, the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute, at Queen’s University Belfast. Over the course of an impressive career, Marsha’s research has focused particularly on the complex relationships between gender, militarisation and peacekeeping. As well as writing a wealth of articles and chapters on these topics, she has spent time over the past 20 years documenting the social exp...
In this episode, Alice interviews two guests about the 'peace knowledge' produced by different museums. Charlotte Houlahan joins us from Yorkshire, where she is principal curator at The Peace Museum in Saltaire, near Bradford. Alongside her, Lydia Cole, a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, shares insights from her new research project, 'Curating Peace', which examines ways that exhibitions and museum collections shape public knowledge of peacemaking in the United...
In this episode, Alice interviews Solon Simmons and Audrey Williams who respectively direct and manage The Narrative Transformation Lab. Based at the Carter School, their mission is ‘to reflect on and experiment with the kinds of stories that define our lives and empower our imaginations’. Their work has been particularly focused on the ways in which storytelling can help drive conflict transformation and enhance our futures thinking – so it goes to the heart of what the Visualising War and P...
In this episode, Visualising Peace student Teddy Henderson interviews Lieutenant Colonel Henderson and Major McCord MBE about their experiences and understanding of Peace Operations within the British Military.   Lt Col Henderson is currently the Commanding Officer of Aberdeen and Tayforth Officer Training Regiment (ATOTR) but had extensive prior experience deployed around the world on peace support operations, particularly in mentoring and building the capacity of national forces. Maj McCord...
In this episode, Visualising Peace researcher Harris Siderfin interviews Lord Jim Wallace, Baron Wallace of Tankerness, about his career and the relationship between peace and politics in the UK.  Lord Wallace is a Scottish Liberal Democrat politician with a long career of service in the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament and the House of Lords, where he has been a life peer since 2007. He has held various ministerial positions during his time in government, including Deputy First Mini...
In this podcast Alice interviews Dr Jana Tabak, an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Jana’s work focuses on children’s experiences of conflict in both the global south and the global north, and also on the role that our conceptions of childhood play in our habits of visualising war – and, indeed, in how our habits of visualising war shape how we view children and childhoods. More broadly she is interested in children’s ...
This episode is a follow-up to an earlier conversation with Anne Lene Stein which focused on peace activism in Israel and Palestine.  We invited her back onto the podcast to share another important strand of research with us, based on her recent work with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.   As several of our other episodes discuss, forced displacement is a recurring legacy of conflict all around the world. In recent years, wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, the DRC and Sudan (to ...
In this podcast Alice interviews two guests, both based at the US Army War College and both researching AI-enabled military technologies. LTC Dr Paul Lushenko is the Director of Special Operations and a Faculty Instructor in the U.S. Army War College’s Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations. Paul has combined an academic career with regular military deployments, directing intelligence operations at the Battalion, Combined Task Force, and Joint Task Force levels. He is the c...
In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Joseph Scales, a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Religion, Philosophy and History at the University of Agder in Norway. This podcast is the second part of a pair looking at the history and representation of conflict in ancient Judea.    In part 1, Conflict and Identity in Ancient Judaism, Joe gave us a whirlwind tour of a whole series of conflicts that shaped Jewish history from around 175 BCE through to the early second century C...
In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Joseph Scales, a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Religion, Philosophy and History at the University of Agder in Norway. Joe’s doctoral research analysed spaces of Jewish identity in ancient Galilee, looking particularly at the impact of material culture on personal, communal and regional identity formation during the Hasmonean dynasty, from 100 BCE onwards. His book Galiliean Spaces of Identity will be published in 2024.   &n...
In this episode, Visualising Peace student Madighan Ryan interviews Dr. Mark Wong, a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Research Methods, and the Deputy Head of Urban Studies, at the University of Glasgow. Dr. Wong has extensive expertise in the fields of responsible AI and the Just Transition, and has been an advisor in this capacity to the Scottish Government and Public Health Scotland, amongst other institutions. He is also the principal investigator of the interdisciplinary Innovator’s ...
In this episode, Alice interviews Anne Lene Stein, a PhD Student in the Department of Political Science at Lund University, in Sweden. With a background in both social anthropology and peace-and-conflict studies, Anne’s research over the past ten years has focused on peace activism in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon (among other places). She is particularly interested in protest and resistance in asymmetrical conflict settings, and has conducted several rounds of fieldwork in the region to unde...
In this episode, Visualising Peace student Albert Surinach I Campos interviews Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini, Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. While Prof. Pezzini's main area of research is in Classics, his interests extend beyond the ancient world, focussing particularly on Tolkien life and literary corpus. He is set to publish a monograph soon on Tolkien’s theory of imagination, stemming from his work as Tolkien Editor for the Journal of Inkli...
In this episode, Visualising Peace student Robert Rayner interviews Debby Flack. Debby served as an Ecumenical Accompanier (EA) with EAPPI in Palestine and Israel. EAPPI is a World Council of Churches programme which sends human rights monitors to Palestine and Israel for three months at a time. The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel was formed in response to a 2002 call from the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem to create an international peacekeeping presence in Palesti...
In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Jaremey McMullin, a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Jaremey’s research spans a wide range of topics, from ex-combatant disarmament and veteran reintegration to youth peacebuilding and political participation in post-conflict contexts.   His 2013 monograph Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State: Challenges of Reintegration examines disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration policies and experie...
In this episode, Alice interviews Prof. Steve Murdoch, Head of Military History at the Swedish Defence University. Before taking up that role, Steve was a professor of military history at the University of St Andrews, and he has been a generous supporter of the Visualising War project from its start. Steve’s research focuses on Scottish and Scandinavian relations in the early modern period. He has worked particularly on the Thirty Years War, fought from 1618-1648; and he has also written a ra...






