Ancient Peace Studies Network: inaugural workshop

Bringing together a mix of ancient-world researchers with experts in later peace history, modern peace and conflict studies, social anthropology and psychology, and war and peace storytelling, this inaugural workshop of the Ancient Peace Studies Network will facilitate dialogue between scholars working in ancient and non-ancient fields, and between Humanities and Social Science approaches, both to establish rigorous foundations for the development of a new field of ancient peace studies and to provide modern peace studies with a theoretically-informed ‘pre-history' of peace imaginaries and peacebuilding approaches that went on to influence later periods.

The workshop will particularly consider the following questions:

• How was peace understood, experienced and represented across antiquity by ordinary people in diverse contexts and communities?
• Which discourses of peace and approaches to peacebuilding became particularly dominant in different periods and communities, and why
• Whose perspectives were marginalised in the process, and with what consequences?
• How do prevailing habits of visualising the whole spectrum of peace, from personal peace to interstate conflict resolution and post-conflict recovery, inform everyday life, and the other way around?
• What can both ancient-world scholarship and contemporary peace studies gain from a more inclusive study of ancient experiences of peace and its absence?
• And how can an enhanced understanding of ancient cultures of peace contribute to peace literacy in the 21st century?

To register interest, please contact Professor Alice König at [email protected].