Visualising War and Peace

Speculative Fiction: NATO 2099

In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Florence Gaub, Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College in Rome. A security expert and futurist, she has held key positions such as deputy director at the EU Institute for Security Studies, foresight advisor at the EU Council, and special advisor to EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. Beginning her career at NATO’s Middle East Faculty in 2009, Florence now focuses on strategic foresight and geopolitical trends. Her publications include the bestseller Zukunft: Eine Bedienungsanleitung (2023 – soon to be published in English as Future: A Manual), the EU’s Global Trends to 2030 (2019), and The Cauldron: NATO’s Libya Operation (2018). Florence serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Complex Risks and is a member of the World Science Fiction Society; and last year, she published a graphic novel, NATO 2099, which we discuss in this episode. To get us started, Florence outlines the work of the Research Division at the NATO Defence College, and we discuss the challenges of looking beyond known and predictable futures. We reflect on the fast pace of change across many domains today, and our collective experience of 'future shock' as we grapple with many different kinds of uncertainty and transition at one time. Florence discusses some of the ways in which war in particular is being transformed, pointing to cognitive warfare, biological warfare and grey war, where distinctions between military and civilian spheres of action become blurred. This leads us to consider the tools we can cultivate to predict the unpredictable. We chat about the power of boredom in prompting us to pay attention to 'weak signals' and the role of imagination in visualising future scenarios. Florence stresses the importance of creative methods, both to foster and to communicate futures thinking. She discusses some of her own initiatives in this space, such as the creation of 'newspapers from the future'; and we delve deep into her graphic novel NATO 2099, which transports readers to a world that our children and grandchildren might inhabit, prompting us to reflect on both technological and human methods of prediction. We hope you enjoy the episode! If you do, you might want to check out a couple of episodes from our archive which also explore speculative and useful fiction. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Ancient Warfare on Film

In this episode, Alice interviews Professor Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, based at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and Professor Lee Brice, from Western Illinois University. Konstantinos’ research focuses on the afterlife of ancient Greece and Rome in the Western world, and several of his publications examine the representation of ancient history on stage and screen. Lee is a military historian, focusing especially on military unrest and indiscipline during the time of Alexander the Great and in the early Roman empire. He contributed a reflective conclusion to a collection of essays which Konstantinos masterminded, published in 2023 as Brill’s Companion to ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film. As Konstantinos puts it, ‘Celluloid antiquity is saturated with images of combat’. In our discussion, we dig deep into how ancient war and peacemaking have been depicted in film from the 1960s to the present day. We track changes across time in the cinematic representation of ancient violence and heroism, in relation to developments in film history and contemporary socio-political contexts. Films such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Troy, 300, Gladiator, and Hercules are all unpicked; and along the way we discuss the ways in which they construct masculinity, humanise action heroes, stigmatise Others, and normalise war as a pathway to 'greatness'. We consider how political and military events have influenced the representation of ancient warfare on the one hand, and how films depicting ancient warfare have become commentaries on contemporary contexts on the other. Konstantinos and Lee also discuss the future of 'sword-and-sandel' movies, including the role that AI may increasingly play, and the real-world impacts of evolving trends in cinematic depictions of ancient warfare. We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

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Peace and Peacebuilding in ancient Persia

In this episode, Alice interviews two academics who are part of the newly-founded Ancient Peace Studies Network: Professor John Hyland and Dr Rhyne King. John is a professor of ancient history at Christopher Newport University, specialising in the history of Achaemenid Persia and its relations with Classical Greece and ancient Anatolia, during the 6th-4th centuries BCE. He is the author of Persian Interventions: the Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta 450-386 BCE (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and co-editor of Brill's Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires (Brill, 2024), and he has a new book just out called Persia's Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Empire on the Achaemenid Frontier (Oxford, 2025). Rhyne is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, who also researches the Achaemenid Persian Empire, drawing on Greek historiographical sources (Herodotus, Xenophon, etc.) and documentary evidence in Middle Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic.His first book, published with the University of California press in 2025, is called The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire. This episode digs into different conceptualisations of peace and peacebuilding across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, exploring it both from a domestic viewpoint and in the light of interstate relations. We touch on sources such as the famous Cyrus Cylinder, and its ongoing resonance in Iranian identity-building and international politics today. And we explore the peace rhetoric of kings such as Darius I, as seen in e.g. the Bīsotūn monument. The conversation considers the relationship between peace and order, peace and the gods, and peace and 'paradise'; and we also discuss the insights which ancient Persian peace imaginaries might offer on modern concepts and practices. We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Bearing witness to women's war trauma in ancient Greek tragedy

In this podcast, Alice interviews Dr Erika Weiberg, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University. Erika has recently published a book called Demanding Witness: Women and the Trauma of Homecoming in Greek Tragedy, which investigates how the trauma of female characters is represented and received in four ancient Greek tragedies about war's aftermath. To quote Erika’s own summary of the book: ‘it argues that tragic representations of female noncombatants’ trauma after war expose the ripple effects of violence that wars create, even for individuals and communities distant from the fighting. Yet female characters’ trauma is also difficult to recognize and address because doing so challenges social hierarchies and ingrained power structures. As a result, these characters’ testimonies bring about a conflict of witnessing for other characters and the audience.’ Erika’s research into the structural and chronic violence done to women who have survived war through the marginalisation of their wartime experiences – and into the efforts some of them go to, to bear witness and have others also witness their trauma – offers important insight into habits of visualising war and their intersection with wider social structures and hierarchies. The podcast starts with a discussion of the 'trauma hero narrative', which tends to focus attention on men’s (and especially soldiers') wartime experiences and their post-conflict journeys. As Erika argues, it is not simply the case that women’s experiences of wartime trauma are given less visibility and narrative attention than men’s, but also that women’s suffering in Greek tragedy is often staged to expose male concerns – male agency, male inner conflict, male suffering, even. For this reason, we often see women in Greek tragedy having to go to some lengths to 'demand witness' to their own experiences. As well as demanding witness to war's most obvious kinds of impacts, the women we encounter in Greek tragedy also experience more 'ambiguous' kinds of trauma, as Erika explains. We discuss 'chronic trauma', which does not centre around or get resolved by singular events; 'insidious trauma', i.e. the gradual accumulation of trauma that can be exacerbated through power imbalances and marginalisation; and the ripple effects of 'perpetrator trauma' which can flow as a moral injury to those associated with the original perpetrator. Erika also discusses moments in Greek tragedy where we see women losing control of the trauma narratives that are told about them and 'the trauma survivor's mental and emotional estrangement from their own story.' Erika reflects on the role that Greek tragedy can play in sharpening our awareness not only of the different kinds of traumas that women can experience in and through war but also of our habits of picturing and narrating it. And she also discusses the role that modern trauma theory can play in helping us read ancient Greek tragedies in new ways. We hope you find the episide interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Peace and Peacemaking in ancient Greece and Rome

This episode dives deep into ancient peace history, as Alice interviews Professor Polly Low, from Durham University, and Dr Hannah Cornwell, from the University of Birmingham. Polly is a historian of ancient Greece, with a particular interest in political history and interstate relations. Her 2007 book on Interstate Relations in Classical Greece examined the norms and ethics that shaped relations between Greek city states, the scope and enforcement of ‘international law’, and the complexities of diplomacy across the Classical period. An expert on Greek inscriptions, she has published on many other aspects of Greek political history – including imperialism, political mechanisms for restoring or ensuring stability, discourses of victory and defeat, and the commemoration of the war dead in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Hannah’s research focuses on Roman socio-political history, and she is particularly interested in Roman imperialism, discourses of power, ideas of peace and approaches to diplomacy. Her 2017 book Pax and the Politics of Peace examined the two generations that spanned the collapse of the Republic and the Augustan period in order to understand how the concept of pax Romana evolved, as a central ideology of Roman imperialism. She has also published multiple articles and chapters on the representation of Roman peace-makers in literary accounts, on negotiation and diplomacy during the Roman civil wars, physical sites of diplomatic practice, and the performance and theatre of diplomacy – among other topics. In this episode, we explore Greek and Roman understandings of peace and approaches to peacemaking. Polly and Hannah discuss the sources available to us, whose experiences of peace they particularly foreground, and what they can tell us about how ideas of peace evolved across antiquity. We consider the relationship between peacemaking and imperialism, habits of truce-making, the intricacies of diplomacy, and peace as a performance. The episode covers several hundred years of history, considering civil war contexts as well as interstate relations, and differences between democratic Athens and Rome under the Principate. We hope you enjoy the conversation. It's a long one, because of the ground we cover, so we'd suggest you listen in two halves! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

'Small' violence at the threshold of war and peace, with Lauren Benton

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-blown war, and this has culminated in her most recent book, published in 2024 by Princeton University Press, titled They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Covering 500 years of history, from 1400-1900, it shines a spotlight on the many forms of violence (from raiding and enslaving to small wars and sudden massacres, all hallmarks of European imperialism) that regularly took place during times of so-called peace – calling into question how we categorise and define both peace and war. In the podcast we dig into the book's findings, as Lauren outlines her interest in writing a different kind of global history which incorporates different cultures and perspectives and which looks beyond 'great battles' and the classic war stories we are all used to reading. She helps us grapple with the whole spectrum of what she calls 'violence at the threshold of war and peace', noting that so-called 'small' wars have never had small impacts on the people involved. We discuss truces and their potential to drive, not just end, conflict; and Lauren outlines the violence inherent in many peace-keeping responses and 'protection emergencies', which securitise, other and control people, especially in the context of imperial power. Lauren draws attention to the role that domestic households have long played in the 'constant drumbeat' of recurring violence that accompanies imperialism, and also to the intersection of 'regimes of armed peace' and racism. We discuss ancient and modern examples, reflecting on how blurred the boundary between war and peace often is. And we discuss what is at stake in exactly how we categorise and name different forms of violence, as e.g. full-blown war, insurgency, a 'special operation', or peacekeeping. Lauren underlines the extent to which we continue to anticipate and accept ‘small wars’ as ‘a structural, even expected, condition of interpolity relations’; and she notes the tragic irony of our assumption that it is only by conducting this kind of supposedly ‘protective’ violence that we might achieve future peace. We hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation about recurring patterns of conflict that history often overlooks. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

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New Perspectives on WarTIME with Beryl Pong

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 (published in 2020 by Oxford University Press) brings together her research on wartime literature, film and art and looks specifically at how people articulated and navigated temporal anxieties in the context of WWII. Beryl's interest in space and time, and in literary, sound and visual cultures, is also key to her current research on drone warfare. In 2024 she co-edited a book on Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology; and she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture at Cambridge, which explores how drones are impacting the way we see and relate to our world. The episode starts by diving into some WWII literature to explore the concept of chronophobia: a dread of both past and future, coloured by the in-between-ness of a long period of conflict that followed on from the First World War and led into the Cold War. As Beryl explains, anxieties about past and future are common to many wartime experiences, but they take on some specific resonances during WWII. Along the way, we also explore 'micro temporalities' during wartime, such as the anxiety that builds during a day about what night-time air raids might bring. We move from discussing 20th-century 'war in the skies' to discussion of the impact that drone technologies are having on how we visualise war itself, as well as how people in conflict zones get viewed. As Beryl underlines, drones promote habits of viewing that are often top-down, imperial and securitising, with a host of real-world consequences for different people on the ground. We discuss the importance of countering this with more bottom-up ways of looking at contemporary wartime experiences, and this leads to some conversation about the roles that art can play in showing us war from new perspectives. This podcast connects to conversations in previous episodes with Julian Wright, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox and Paul Lushenko and Jerilyn Packer. We hope you enjoy the discussion. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

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Introducing the Ancient Peace Studies Network

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 stories, and how Prof. König's team is working to change that by investigating whose voices and experiences are reflected in ancient accounts of peace and reconciliation. What can ancient approaches to conflict resolution teach us about modern peacebuilding? In this thought-provoking special episode, we explore how elite-centered peace narratives shaped societal attitudes in antiquity and continue to influence our understanding of peace today. Prof. König reveals how her interdisciplinary network is "reading against the grain" of ancient sources to uncover ordinary people's lived experiences of peace—voices that have been historically marginalized but might offer valuable insights for contemporary peace literacy. Don't miss our conversation about bridging academic research with creative outreach, as Prof. König shares details about the network's collaboration with a professional theater company, NMT Automatics, and the upcoming multi-authored publication, "New Visions of Ancient Peace." This episode offers a perfect blend of historical scholarship and practical application, demonstrating how ancient wisdom might help us visualize and build more effective paths to peace in our modern world. We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Ancient war stories and their real-world ramifications

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 explores the conception of visualisation: the ways in which narratives of war not only reflect or depict conflict but also envision it, in ways that shape how conflict gets pursued or prevented in the real world. She also discusses the role that interplay between narratives and discourses can play in cementing and amplifying influential war imaginaries. And she considers the impacts which all of this war-storytelling has on ordinary lives in the everyday. In the process, Alice reflects on connections between ancient habits of visualising and narrating war and modern discourses and behaviours. Among other topics, she wonders why narratives of peril and danger seem more attractive than narratives of peace; what consequences might flow from ancient tendencies to euphemise or romanticise violence towards women; and what force military metaphors have in civilian contexts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The episode ranges back and forth between antiquity and modernity, as Alice discusses militarism(s), the narrative role of children in war storytelling, the complex relationship between discourses of war, knowledge and power, and many other such topics. We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

The End of Peacekeeping with Marsha Henry

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 experiences of people living and working in peacekeeping missions. Her book on this ethnographic-inspired research, The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention, was published in March 2024 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The episode starts with Marsha discussing militarism (the ideology that armed conflict is acceptable, normal, even impressive, noble, desirable - and of greater value in society than many civilian activities) and militarisation (the process by which individuals and groups, civilians as well as soldiers, are socialised into war-oriented worldviews). As she underlines, militarisation often intersects with discourses of gender (that reflect and generate inequalities between men and women) and also with discourses of race and colonisation (again leading to inequalities and oppression). While it is less studied, the same trend can be observed in contexts of peacekeeping, where ideas of gender and race can similarly result in unequal and harmful experiences. This has led Marsha to adopting 'intersectional feminist methodologies' in her study of both militarisation and peacekeeping - an approach she explains in detail. The bulk of the episode focuses on Marsha's study of current systems of peacekeeping, in particular the harms perpetrated in official peacekeeping missions via e.g. gender-based violence, colonising impulses, and global north thinking. In her book The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha argues that peacekeeping is not simply a practical but also ‘an epistemic project that actively produces knowledge about peacekeeping, peoples, and practices and as such maintains global systems of power and inequality including heterosexism, colonialism, racism, and militarism’. For that reason, she advocates for its abolition - a proposal we discuss in depth. In exploring alternatives to current peacekeeping practices, Marsha underlines the need for 'knowing differently' by examining peacekeeping more systematically from the perspectives of 'the peacekept'. We discuss the power of different peace imaginaries to shift habits of thinking and doing, and the need to visualise peacekeeping broadly, as encompassing e.g. environmental work. Despite advocating for an end to peacekeeping, Marsha concludes the episode by looking ahead to positive futures - achievable if we are able to dismantle gendered, racist and colonising approaches that for too long have resulted in peacekeeping itself becoming a mechanism of direct, cultural and structural. We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Curating Peace: the role of museums

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 Kingdom. The Peace Museum in Saltaire is the UK’s only peace museum. Founded in 1994, it recently moved to new premises, which prompted its curators to think afresh about the kinds of peace stories it shares with the public. Charlotte gives listeners a flavour of some of the items in its collection, talks us through the design of its new exhibition space, and reflects on its mission to empower and inspire visitors through the human stories of individual peace activists past and present. Lydia helps us to identify the different kinds of peace knowledge present in war-oriented museum spaces, such as London's Imperial War Museum. Discussing their WWI and WWII galleries, their Peace and Security section, and their 2017 temporary exhibition 'People Power', she discusses different approaches - some of which focus on top-down, institutional forms of peacebuilding, while others centre ordinary people and even take the curation of peace knowledge (and conflict histories) beyond the museum space. The conversation ends with some important reflections on the challenges of talking about peace amid conflict, the benefits that might arise from the development of more peace-oriented museums, and the ripple effects beyond the museum space of sharing peace knowledge in the everyday. We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. You can access our own virtual Museum of Peace here. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Narrative Transformation: storytelling for peace

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 Peace project is interested in: the feedback loop between narrative and reality, which can sometimes drive conflict but can also be harnessed for positive social and political change. As they put it on their website: ‘At TNT Lab, we believe that the only way to change the world is to understand its most abusive stories in order to reshape them and to understand its most hopeful stories in order to harness their transformative power.’ Solon Simmons is a Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Carter School at George Mason University, in Virginia in the US. He is the author of Root Narrative Theory and Conflict Resolution (Routledge, 2020) and the newly published Narrating Peace: How to Tell a Conflict Story (available from Aug 2024), among many other publications. At the Carter School, he teaches classes on conflict theory, narrative, media, discourse and conflict, human rights, quantitative and qualitative methodology, global conflict, and critical theory. Audrey Williams earned a Master of Science degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from the Carter School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and French from the University of Iowa. She was a 2015–16 Fulbright Research Fellow in Ankara, Turkey, and a Fall 2013 Scoville Peace Fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. She is now a PhD candidate in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Carter School, and her dissertation focuses on the role of narrative and musical craft in conflict transformation. During the podcast, Solon and Audrey discuss their mixed methods approach, which blends Social Science and Humanities methodologies. They reflect on 'the narrative turn' in peace and conflict studies, the importance of attending to the craft side of storytelling, and their hope that TNT Lab's research and resources will help both academics and storytelling practitioners (in many different media) to de-code the rhetorical structures and subtexts of other people's stories and curate their own to forge positive change. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Between war and peace: military involvement in peacebuilding

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 has also deployed to many conflicts around the world, including peace operations, and has experienced life in the British Army from soldier through to Lt Col. Maj McCord is currently the Officer in Command of A Squadron TUOTC (St Andrews University Officer Training Corps). This episode discusses the experiences of both individuals from their deployments and their perspectives on how military intervention can help in different peacebuilding processes, by bringing stability and protection to a conflict-stricken area. Operational success and failures are discussed and military training and awareness in response to the changing landscape of future conflict is explored. Ethical questions about external interventions and using violence against violence in efforts to build peace are also reflected upon. In response to an increasingly critical public view of military intervention, this podcast sheds some light on what military interventions look like, and what roles they can play in wider peace operations and conflict transformation. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound editing by Teddy Henderson Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Peace and Politics with Lord Jim Wallace

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 Minister of Scotland, acting First Minister twice, Justice Minister and Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Minister. He trained initially in law, and in addition to his political career he is an advocate and member of the King's Council. He served as Advocate General for Scotland between 2010 and 2015, and he was Deputy Leader of the House of Lords from 2013 to 2015. He stood down as leader of the Liberal Democrat peers in the House of Lords in 2016 but retains an interest in human rights and constitutional affairs. Among other roles, he served as Moderator of the General Assembly of Scotland in 2021. In the episode, Lord Wallace reflects on his long career in politics and on the various ways in which he has seen politics and peacemaking intersect over that time. He reflects on the lack of political interest in solving conflict in Northern Ireland prior to John Major's premiership; on political debates about the first and second Gulf Wars, the renewal of Trident (as a nuclear deterrent), the UK's response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria; and on the limited discussions in Westminster about ways to address conflict in the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia. Lord Wallace is clear that peace is not as high a priority in political debates and campaigning as many other issues, and also that political understanding and discussion of peace-making (as opposed to peace-keeping) is somewhat lacking. Lord Wallace and Harris consider positive steps forward: for instance, more attention paid to justice, equality, mental health, climate change, poverty and discrimination, as key aspects of peacebuilding. Reflecting on his own faith, Lord Wallace also talks about the role that different religions and religious leaders can play in promoting peace both at home and abroad. Several times the conversation also turns to connections between democracy, debate and peacebuilding, with Lord Wallace stressing that increasingly combative, polarising modes of political discussion are driving more conflict. This ties into some work which the Visualising Peace team is doing on connections between peacebuilding and Responsible Debate (as outlined in the Young Academy of Scotland's Responsible Debate Charter). We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Harris Siderfin and Zofia Guertin

Children, Childhoods and Child-Soldiering: critical lenses on war

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 political subjecthood and their ‘political becoming’: how ideas of children get deployed in global politics, how children’s agency as political actors gets constrained by adult frameworks, and what children can contribute to politics (and particularly to discussions of war and peace) when mechanisms for their inclusion work better. Together with Marshall Beier, Jana has edited two influential volumes on Children, Childhoods and Everyday Militarisms (in 2020) and on Childhoods in Peace and Conflict in 2021. These draw attention to the multiplicity of both real and imagined childhoods, and how different militarisms intersect with and inform different childhoods around the world. Some of Jana’s published work focuses particularly on representations and conceptions of child soldiering in different parts of the world. In 2020 she published a monograph called The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress, along with a range of other articles on related topics; and her current project is looking specifically at recruitment of junior soldiers in the UK. The episode begins with discussion of our norms of visualising children and childhood, particularly how concepts of children/childhood get constructed in and for global politics. Jana stresses that such habits tend to exclude children as political subjects in the present, while including them as potential citizens in the future. More worryingly still, Jana notes, the reduction of conceptions of childhood to one idealised model can end up 'othering' children whose childhoods (through no fault of their own) differ from standard/Western expectations. We consider the tendency, when visualising children-in-war, to regard them as ‘passive skins’, victims with no agency to shape their own fate; and we also ask how this shapes our understandings of war and conflict, not just views of children and/as victims. Jana helps us look critically at the many forms of militarism which touch different children's lives, and we spend some time considering how 'child soldiers' tend to be visualised, in comparison with junior recruits to (e.g.) the UK's armed forces. Along the way, Jana stresses the importance of doing research with children as co-producers of knowledge, and of exploring the blurred/maleable boundaries of both childhood and war. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Transitional place-making: Palestinian refugee experiences in Lebanon

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 name just a few) have displaced millions of people from their homes; and in recent months hundreds of thousands more people have been displaced within Gaza, sometimes multiple times. This is not a new phenomenon; as Anne underlines, Palestinians have been seeking sanctuary in many different places, for many years - including in Lebanon, where some Palestinians have been living as refugees for multiple generations. Anne begins the conversation by explaining what drove so many Palestinian refugees to Lebanon in the first place, over 70 years ago; and how many continue to live in supposedly temporary refugee camps around the country. She describes the challenging living conditions in these camps, the lack of freedom and rights for their inhabitants, and the ways in which the camps are governed and controlled by both internal and external forces. This leads to a particular focus of Anne's research: how young people, born and raised in these camps, construct their identities and visualise their futures. For many displaced Palestinians, retaining refugee status is crucial in holding on to the right to return home some day; but this comes with significant costs, perpetuating poverty and disenfranchisement. Anne discusses some of the ways in which young people in refugee camps in Lebanon try to overcome the stigma attached to being displaced, pushing back against dominant narratives; how they use different media and methods to imagine 'home' in new ways, overcoming the 'politics of temporality'; and how they employ everyday acts of resistance to exercise agency and take more control over their lives. This gets us talking about peace imaginaries as well as habits of visualising forced displacement. We end the episode by considering what lessons we might learn from the experiences of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon as we seek better ways to support people newly displaced by conflict. As Anne underlines, we need to find political - not just humanitarian - solutions; and we should invest in solutions that maximise refugee rights and avoid re-victimising people. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

AI-enabled military technologies: technology, ethics, trust, storytelling

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 co-editor of Drones and Global Order: Implications of Remote Warfare for International Society (2022), which studies the implications of drone warfare on global politics. With colleague Shyam Raman he has also co-authored Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions (Routledge in 2024), which explores public’s perceptions of legitimate drone strikes. Dr Jerilyn Packer is an award-winning educator, specialising in the US military school system. Twelve years ago she transitioned into educational leadership, which enables her to engage in reflective practices and collaborative coaching with district and school leaders in the Department of Defense Education Activity. Skilled in strategic planning, professional learning, and data analysis, she partners with senior leaders to identify educational gaps and craft targeted solutions to improve achievement. Dr. Packer is currently running a research project which uses interviews and focus groups among senior officers to determine what shapes their trust in AI-enabled military technologies. Going forward, she hopes to employ this research in an upcoming role within the Senior Executive Service, so her findings will have broad policy impact. Paul and Jerilyn help us grapple with recent technological developments in warfare which have huge implications for how governments, militaries and the public visualise conflict – and indeed peacekeeping – now and in the future. Indeed, as Paul’s 2022 edited volume underlines, drone warfare and AI require us to rethink the structural and normative pillars of global order. Between them, they discuss recent developments in drones and AI technologies; their increasing incorporation into military arsenals, strategy and practice; barriers to their use such as concerns around ethics, governance and trust; and the ways in which they are changing our habits of visualising war itself. Among other topics, we touch on the dehumanising, racist and colonial dimensions of drone warfare; the moral questions posed by asymmetric/'riskless'/'post-heroic' conflict; and connections between Greek myths, dystopian science fiction and the new war-storytelling patterns that are increasingly inspired by AI. This episode offers important reflections, based on both Paul and Jerilyn's research, into the challenges and concerns of professionals who find themselves in an often 'uneasy partnership' with emerging military technologies, and poses critical questions about wider public understandings and perceptions. We hope you find the discussion interesting. Paul dives deeper into these important topics in recent articles 'Trust but Verify' and 'AI and the future of warfare'. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Visualising action: pre-battle speeches in ancient Judaism

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 CE – looking particularly at their impact on Jewish nationhood and identity formation. That conversation provides really useful context for this epsiode, which dives deep into some of the textual sources for Jewish conflict history in antiquity. Joe draws particularly on his current research project, called Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, which examines the nature of pre-battle speeches in ancient Jewish texts and their relationship to established forms of pre-battle exhortation in Greek and Roman sources. As Joe has written: ‘People resort to violence for all kinds of reasons. In the interests of peace, it is essential to understand how people may be incited toward organised violence. …In warfare, combatants are often incited towards their actions by others, and in the ancient world, such incitement frequently took the form of a pre-battle speech: Greek, Roman and Jewish literature contains many examples.’ In unpicking a wide range of ancient pre-battle speeches, and exploring recurring components (such as the othering of enemies, claims about the just or necessary nature of upcoming violence, a commander’s handling of his soldiers’ fears, and visualisations of success), Joe’s research contributes not only to a deeper understanding of how warfare was conceptualised and driven in antiquity but also to wider reflections on how organised violence can be conceptualised, justified and incited today. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Conflict and Identity in ancient Judaism

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. Joe’s work on Jewish and Hellenistic identities, and their cross-cultural interactions, has led to further research on ancient Jewish texts written in Greek, which enable us to understand aspects of the shared culture of the ancient Mediterranean world; and he has become very interested in women’s practices and rituals in Judaism. Both of these research interests feed into his current project, called Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, which examines the nature of pre-battle speeches in ancient Jewish texts and their relationship to established forms of pre-battle exhortation in Greek and Roman sources. Because the politics of the region in this period are so complex, we have recorded a Part 1 and a Part 2 for this podcast. In this episode, Part 1, Joe talks us through Jewish interactions with other groups and political powers in the region from around 175BCE to the early 2nd century CE – to help us understand the history of Judea and Jerusalem, and the ways in which ongoing conflict (near and far) shaped Jewish practice and identity, not just at the time but for many centuries afterwards. In Part 2 (which we hope you will also listen to, because it’s super interesting!), Joe dives deep into some of the textual sources from the period, looking particularly at the ways in which they visualised battle itself and justified war. We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Visualising a Sustainable Future through Gaming with Mark Wong

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 Assemble Project at the University of Glasgow, which produced the subject of this podcast: SEvEN: Seven voices, One Future, a videogame aimed at building an environmentally sustainable future for Scotland by highlighting Minoritized Ethnic people’s voices and the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. SEvEN was recently nominated in the Spirit of Scotland Category for the Scottish Games Awards. This episode draws on Madighan Ryan's research into the synergies between environmental sustainability and peace. She is looking at everything from the importance of inner peace in remaining resilient as a member of the climate movement, to the necessity of a healthy environment in lowering risk of scarcity and geopolitical conflict. Her aim is to emphasize that peacebuilding and environmental action are not two separate entities but intimately connected. Madighan is particularly keen to draw on conversations with the wider Visualising Peace team about the importance of involving traditionally marginalised groups and minoritised voices in conversations that connect climate and peacebuilding, and it was for this reason that she invited Dr Wong to share his innovate gaming project with listeners. In the first part of the podcast, Dr. Wong establishes the inseparability of peace and sustainability. Not only is mitigating and adapting to climate change necessary for a peaceful future, Dr. Wong emphasises that a peaceful future will only be possible if the voices of minoritised ethnic peoples are centred in conversations surrounding a just transition towards an environmentally and socially sustainable future. The rest of the podcast is a deep dive into the details of SEvEN. Dr. Wong speaks on everything from design choices, to the real-life impact of SEvEN, to the effectiveness of video games as a tool to visualise peace. As Dr. Wong paints a picture of SEvEN, it becomes evident that this video game is a means of visualising peace in two different and interconnected capacities. First, the game helps players visualise peace and sustainability as a process that should centre minoritised ethnic peoples’ voices and traditional knowledge. Players learn the importance of listening and of supporting this type of knowledge. Second, the process itself of co-designing the video game with different industry partners in a collaborative manner does so much to teach the designers and to bolster community involvement. The way in which SEvEN was produced is itself an example of peacebuilding. Please enjoy this episode as we immerse ourselves into the sustainable world of SEvEN and explore gaming as a means of visualising peace! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Madighan Ryan