Alice König
A fundamental premise of my research on discourses of war and peace is that stories are world-building: the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and conflict reflect reality, up to a point; but they also shape it by influencing how we think, feel and behave (König 2025a, 2025b).
Thanks to the war-storytelling that saturates our daily lives, most of us are far more literate in war than peace, and our understanding of conflict and its resolution centres disproportionately around ‘great men’ and ‘great events’. From early childhood onwards, whether we are directly impacted by conflict or not, we are surrounded by family anecdotes, news reports, social media, public monuments, commemorative practices, novels and films which focus attention on soldiering and grand strategy and skim over the slow, hard labour of conflict prevention, conflict transformation and post-conflict recovery, undertaken by ordinary people – not just political and military leaders – both near and far from war zones.
Our contact with antiquity regularly reinforces this trend, via e.g. school history lessons, popular fiction, film, tourism, and online gaming. For instance, the curation of ancient artefacts in the British Museum in London (to take a seemingly benign example) gives visitors the impression that human history has revolved primarily around warfighting, with powerful leaders and their empires lurching from one armed conflict to the next (Consiglio/König/Oberholtzer 2023). Of in-between times – war’s aftermath, the lulls between clashes, extended periods of peace, and the day-to-day work that countless civilians must have done to recover from, mitigate against or prevent conflict – we see remarkably little. Indeed, the only conceptualisations of peacebuilding on display at the British Museum are the violent images of conflict resolution visible in representations of conquest or triumphal art.
Yet we know that in antiquity, as today, ordinary people repeatedly discussed, sought, lost and made peace, in many different contexts (personal and local, as well as political and intercultural) and a host of different ways. If we do not explore – and narrate – this kind of peace history, it is not only our understanding of antiquity that risks being limited but also our modern peace imaginaries.
It was with these challenges in mind that I founded the Ancient Peace Studies Network; and they have also inspired me to work with professional theatre company NMT Automatics, to co-develop a new play that draws on ancient myth to enhance 21st-century peace literacy via the power of peace storytelling (Senehi 2009; Simmons 2024). I have worked with NMTA in the past, supporting their development of Tempus Fugit: Troy and Us, which premiered in London and then toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to critical acclaim (König/Dunne/D’Young 2025). While that play deployed ancient myth to prompt contemporary reflections on gendered habits of visualising both ancient and modern warfare, the new play we are working on will focus attention on ancient and modern understandings of peace and post-conflict transition.
The play’s title is Long After the Labyrinth; but Rena was our working title during the early stages of development, taken from the main protagonist, a survivor of the Holocaust. Born to a Jewish family in Chania, Crete, in 1934, some of Rena’s earliest and fondest memories are learning Greek myths at school, which we see her continue to engage with as she matures. Rena (short for Eirene, the Greek word for ‘peace’) lives through the occupation of her island by the Nazis, and miraculously escapes, as her family, and the entire Jewish population on the island are rounded up and placed on a ship, the SS Tanais, bound for the Nazi death camps, along with Cretan resistance fighters and Italian prisoners of war.
Rena hides in an ancient olive tree and tumbles into the famous labyrinth of Knossos where she encounters the Minotaur. The labyrinth becomes a liminal space where she begins to process feelings of loss, grief and anger, and this in turn will help the audience to explore different dimensions of post-conflict transition and peacebuilding (Pass 2019, Sparks 2022). Will Rena be able to keep the Minotaur (a manifestation of trauma, anger, revenge and othering) at bay, and what will that take?
The play follows Rena through out her life as she tries to come to terms with the loss of her family and community, and in doing so, takes the audience on a journey to explore different understandings of peace-seeking and peace-making in the wake of conflict, both ancient and modern.
We will be running a series of workshops throughout 2026 and 2027 for both drama students and theatre professionals, exploring the power of peace storytelling via our new play. To find out more, please email [email protected].
References
- Consiglio/König/Oberholtzer (2023) ‘Visualising Peace: a virtual museum’, E-International Relations 01.01.2023: https://www.e-ir.info/2023/01/01/visualising-peace-a-virtual-museum/
- König, A. (2025a) ‘(Inter)visualising War’, in König/Wiater eds. Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: interplay between conflict narratives in different media and genres, Routledge, 1-29
- König, A. (2025b) ‘War Stories are World-Building: Tracing the Feedback Loop between Narrative and Reality, from antiquity to today’; König/Wiater (eds.) Visualising War, 244-67
- König/Dunne/D’Young (2025) ‘From Achilles to Andromache to Afghanistan and beyond’; König/Wiater (eds.) Visualising War, 268-83
- Pass, S. (2019) ‘Tyler in the Labyrinth: A Young Child’s Journey from Chaos to Coherence’, Psychoanalytic dialogues, 29(5), pp. 594–609
- Senehi, J. (2009) ‘Building Peace: storytelling to transform conflicts constructively’ in Sandole/Byrne/ Sandole-Staroste/Senehi eds, Handbook of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Routledge, 201-14
- Simmons, S. (2024) Narrating Peace: how to tell a conflict story, Routledge
- Sparks, B.J. (2022) ‘Representing Trauma: Minotaurs, Myths and l’Indicible in Qui se souvient de la mer’, French studies bulletin, 43(162), pp. 6–10