Book
Drawing on a wide range of visual and textual sources, New Visions of Ancient Peace will be co-authored by APSN members and edited by Alice König. It 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:
- Showcase the diversity of ways in which peace was understood, experienced, built, and threatened across antiquity.
- Amplify unheard voices and marginalised imaginaries.
- Place everyday lives alongside geopolitical discourses, interrogating their interrelationship.
- Raise questions about entrenched habits of visualising (and overlooking) different dimensions of peace/peacebuilding, both past and present.
This publication will supply modern peace studies with a transformative ‘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.
Online compendium
Taking inspiration from the virtual Museum of Peace developed by a team of University of St Andrews students (focused on modern peace/peacebuilding), we will adapt our book New Visions of Ancient Peace into an accessible, online format, to disseminate our research to wider audiences. This online compendium will host our 100 case studies of ancient peace and peacebuilding so that they can be searched for, cross-referenced and shared by a wide range of users globally (other academics in different fields, educators, peacebuilding practitioners, the general public). Our experience of the virtual Museum of Peace has shown how quickly this kind of resource gains traction, leading to invitations to speak at academic conferences, thinktanks, education networks, physical museums, and TED-style events.
Drama collaboration
Across 2025 and 2026 we will be working with professional theatre company NMT Automatics (NMTA) to develop a play that employs ancient myth/history to reflect on different forms of peace and peacebuilding today. Via performances, pre-show talks and drama workshops, our goal is to generate contemporary conversations via ancient storytelling about how individuals and groups can imagine and work for peace in different contexts.
Journal article
‘Dramatising Ancient Peace for the Modern World’. Co-authored by 2 NMTA theatre-makers and 2 to 3 APSN network members, this article will analyse the process of creating accessible theatre that draws on ancient peace histories to enhance modern peace literacy.
Pedagogic project
Our collaborative research will also contribute to an interdisciplinary pedagogic project involving teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary education, designed to de-centre militarising approaches to teaching ancient history/conflict and foreground peace-oriented and trauma-informed learning. Via curriculum reforms, the development of new teaching resources, and teacher-training, this will impact on educators, learners and policy-makers, within and beyond ancient-world studies.
Pedagogic article
‘Ancient Lessons for Modern Peace Teaching’. Co-authored by 2 school-teachers and 2 academic network members, this article will draw on our collective research to argue for key curriculum changes in primary, secondary and tertiary education that will demilitarise school-based learning and deepen young people’s understanding of peace and peacebuilding.
Visualising peace library
APSN network members are encouraged to contribute to the Visualising Peace Library, an expanding online database set up by Visualising Peace students at the University of St Andrews to support cross-disciplinary research on peace/peacebuilding.
We anticipate further academic publications emerging from the APSN: single- and co-authored articles on aspects of peace/peacebuilding in different ancient cultures, methodological articles on creative and interdisciplinary approaches, and pedagogic articles, alongside single-authored and co-authored books.
In addition to the publications outlined above, the APSN aims to inform present-day understandings of peace, peacebuilding and peace-storytelling beyond academia via multiple outreach activities, including through our podcast.