Dunkirk in Korea: on the transwar histories of battle imaginaries Distinguished Scholar Lecture with special guest speaker Professor Tarak Barkawi

The battle of Dunkirk, the evacuation of British and French troops from France in May and June 1940, hovered over the first year of the American war in Korea, repeatedly invoked at various junctures in the seesaw fighting of 1950 to 1951. What, then, is a battle as a social and historical object? How does it participate in the ways in which peoples and armed forces imagine fighting one another?

In the first instance, battles appear as definite events with identifiable outcomes on the course of campaigns and wars, the factual stuff of military history. But as social and historical objects, battles are dependent upon interpretation, upon an imaginary field in which they signify the meanings attributed to them. What are used to interpret battles, in part, are other battles, by the actors fighting them and the historians writing about them. Fighting and its interpretation drive reproduction and transformation of battle imaginaries. Military history emerges as a site where past wars can speak to present and future wars. Fighting enacts and disrupts battle imaginaries, and adds to the repertoire of battle histories from which battle imaginaries take shape.

Professor Tarak Barkawi is a military historian and an interdisciplinary scholar of war and armed force in world politics. His last book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, conceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. The book won the American Historical Association's 2018 Paul Birdsall Prize and the International Studies Association's 2018 Francesco Guicciardini Prize.

He is currently working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics. Tarak has also published articles on war and democracy in international relations, on postcolonial security studies, on critical war studies, and on Max Weber. He has taught professional soldiers in the UK, the US, NATO and elsewhere, and published commentary on global affairs.