100 New Visions of Ancient Peace and Peacebuilding
Does your research touch on ancient peace or peacebuilding in any way? Have you come across an ancient text, object, event or character which might shed new light on ancient ideas of and approaches to conflict prevention or resolution? Do you work on ancient concepts of inner peace, religious peace teaching, trauma-recovery, civil rights and responsibilities, political stability, or interstate relations? Are you a storyteller or artist or creative practitioner who has made use of ancient material to explore peace in later times, or who might do so in future? Are you a professional peacebuilder or confIict resolution practitioner with an interest in past peace histories and what they can tell us about contemporary approaches? If so, we want to hear from you!
We are commissioning 100 short essays (800-1000-words long) that will each focus on a specific object, image, text or event, from any part of antiquity up to the early Middle Ages, shedding light on ancient understandings of peace and peacemaking/peacekeeping/peacebuilding. The goal is to build a cross-cutting mosaic of ancient peace imaginaries and to diversify our understanding of ancient peace history. This compendium of ‘new visions’ of ancient peace and peacebuilding will be published in the first instance as a peer-reviewed book with an academic publisher; but there is scope for some of it to be shared online, as a virtual ‘museum’ of ancient peace and peacebuilding, inspired by this modern equivalent: https://peacemuseum.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk.
You do not have to be an expert in peace studies to contribute – you simply have to have an interesting dimension of ancient peace history to share, either for its own sake or because of the connections/contrasts it suggests between past and present discourses and practices. We mean ‘peace history’ in the broadest sense of the term, deliberately encompassing sources, topics and areas of research that have not typically been included in ancient peace studies to date. In existing scholarship there has been a tendency to follow the lead of a narrow range of elite, war-oriented sources and to focus on highly privileged, geopolitical and militarising ideas of peace and peacebuilding. This volume aims to change that.
Drawing on a wide range of visual and textual sources, New Visions of Ancient Peace and Peacebuilding will offer concise, critical analyses of 100 different manifestations or articulations of peace and peacebuilding from diverse contexts and communities across antiquity, covering the whole spectrum from personal peace (or its absence) to the resolution of armed conflicts, war’s aftermath, and conflict prevention. In juxtaposing well-known visions (as seen on e.g. propagandistic coins, victory monuments or commemoration traditions) with less familiar material (e.g. discussions of conflict resolution within Greek symposium settings, funerary art/inscriptions that illuminate aspects of post-conflict recovery, migration statistics), it will (1) showcase the diversity of ways in which peace was understood, experienced, built, and threatened across antiquity; (2) amplify unheard voices and marginalised imaginaries; (3) place everyday lives alongside geopolitical discourses, interrogating their interrelationship; and (4) raise questions about entrenched habits of visualising (and overlooking) different dimensions of peace/peacebuilding, both past and present.
As well as shaping future directions for ancient peace studies, this publication aims to supply modern peace studies with a ‘deep history’ of concepts, experiences and approaches that have informed visualisations of peace and methods of peacebuilding ever since, and that can be profitably compared with contemporary contexts, in terms of both overlap and difference. This will lead in time to more cross-disciplinary dialogue between ancient and modern peace studies, and also to public-facing interventions which employ ancient peace histories to deepen contemporary peace literacy. Contributors from modern peace and conflict studies, professional peacebuilding and from the creative sector are strongly encouraged!
To find out more or propose a contribution, please contact us on [email protected]. To submit a proposal for a ‘new vision of ancient peace’, please email us a short description your chosen object/text/event/character and the thematic focus of your essay by 30th April 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!