- Which discourses of peace and approaches to peacebuilding became particularly dominant in different periods and places across antiquity, and whose perspectives were marginalised in the process?
- How can we read against the grain of largely male, elite sources to better understand how peace was understood, experienced and built by ordinary people around the ancient world?
- How did prevailing habits of visualising the whole spectrum of peace (from personal peace to interstate conflict resolution) inform everyday life, and vice versa?
- What can both ancient-world scholarship and contemporary peace studies gain from a more ‘grassroots’ study of ancient experiences of peace and its absence?
- And how can an enhanced understanding of ancient habits of visualising peace and peacebuilding contribute to peace literacy in the 21st century?
To date, research on ancient peace and peacebuilding has not only taken place primarily in relation to armed conflict; it has also been carried out for the most part by ancient-world specialists with little or no training in modern peace studies; and it has happened sporadically, without building the same kind of momentum or academic community as ancient military studies.
We aim to address these challenges by developing an interdisciplinary network of researchers, bringing scholars with expertise in diverse areas of antiquity (the Greco-Roman world, the ancient Near East, north Africa, China and beyond) into dialogue with researchers in Medieval and Modern History, International Relations, Psychology, and Peace/Conflict Studies.
The Ancient Peace Studies Network has four core goals:
- In bringing new attention to how peace was imagined, experienced, threatened and built across antiquity, it will establish Ancient Peace Studies as a discrete and important field of study in its own right, not merely a subsection of Ancient Military Studies. In the process, this will accelerate a much-needed de-militarisation of ancient-world scholarship. For far too long, the centring of battle and soldiering in ancient socio-political history has fed into wider (popular as well as scholarly) habits of admiring warfare, contributing to ‘everyday militarisms’.
- Together, members of the APSN aim to excavate a more inclusive history of ancient peace and peacebuilding, both by facilitating comparative analysis across different cultures, communities and time periods, and by looking beyond elite, geopolitical conceptions. We do not underestimate the challenge of amplifying the voices and experiences of people such as women, refugees, slaves and children, who have been overlooked or erased in traditional histories. However, we see the bias of our sources as an opportunity to develop and pilot-test creative new methodologies, both for reconstructing a more holistic picture of ancient warfare’s impacts and aftermath, and for exploring ordinary people’s everyday approaches to conflict prevention, conflict resolution and post-conflict recovery.
- A fundamental premise of the Visualising War and Visualising Peace projects is that stories are world-building: the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of conflict reflect reality, up to a point, but they also help to shape it by influencing how we think, feel and behave, as individuals and societies. A third goal of the Ancient Peace Studies Network is to focus attention on this feedback loop between narrative and reality. By examining the evolution of ancient discourses of peace and peacebuilding across different ancient communities, we will shed new light on how and why some habits of visualising (and therefore pursuing) peace and peacebuilding became particularly dominant. We will also explore the real-world ramifications of those dominant discourses on ordinary people’s lives, learning lessons about the complex interrelationship between representation and reality that are relevant for our understanding of peace and peacebuilding today.
- This connects to the APSN’s fourth goal, which is to forge synergies between ancient and modern peace studies, for the benefit of both. The research carried out by network members will be directly informed by modern peace theory, via the involvement of specialists in contemporary peace research and peacebuilding practice. It also aims to contribute to modern peace studies by offering a theoretically-informed ‘prequel’ to the study of peace and peacebuilding in later times. Our aim is not to trace a direct line of influence between ancient and modern concepts and approaches, but rather to draw on a multitude of ancient case studies to illuminate the diverse ways in which differently-circumstanced people have understood and built peace, both personally and politically, past and present. In short, the APSN is interested in how modern peace studies can transform our study of antiquity; and in how new analyses of ancient discourses of peace and approaches to peacebuilding can enhance peace literacy in the 21st century.
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This project has received generous financial support from The British Academy & Leverhulme Trust (BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants), Royal Society of Edinburgh (Research Collaboration Grant), University of St Andrews STAIRS scheme, and the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews.