Traditionally, war studies (ancient and modern) have focused on realia: on relations between states and diplomatic processes; on political, social or economic drivers of conflict; strategic decision-making, technological preparedness, and tactical manoeuvres; on how military campaigns have actually played out; and aspects of aftermath such as casualty figures or the follow-on reconfiguration of national borders. However, all such aspects of war – indeed, all military activities, past, present and future – are pursued through, experienced via and influenced by storytelling.
Strategic planning, for instance, is an exercise in both imagination (the visualisation of successful future outcomes) and persuasion (of fellow military personnel, and the wider public and press); and it is often shaped by influential accounts of prior strategy-making too. Interstate negotiations are mediated via words and images, as the parties involved evoke past friendship/enmity and figure future relations. And while most conflicts are driven by real factors, such as scarcity of resources, political oppression or social injustice, no co-ordinated use of force by one group against another is ever possible without story-sharing in a range of media that unites, enlists and inspires potential combatants and their wider community, to the point that enough are willing to support and resource this costly endeavour.
It is for this reason that analysis of war-storytelling is just as crucial to our understanding and prevention of armed conflict as the study of historic facts and current capabilities: because war-stories are world-shaping.
Our research project studies trends in war-storytelling across a wide range of genres and media and in many different periods and places. We are interested in how conflict narratives work; and – above all – in how they work on us. The tales that we tell and the pictures we paint of war always reflect reality up to a point; but they also help to shape it, by influencing how we think, feel and behave. This ‘feedback loop’ between narrative and reality is at the heart of our studies.
We are also interested in narrative interactions. Think of Homer’s Iliad, the histories of Livy, the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespeare’s history plays, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Picasso’s Guernica, Shostakovich’s Stalingrad Symphony and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, to name just a few. At first glance these representations of war are all strikingly different. Whether we are conscious of it or not, however, they have long been interacting with each other – in different ways, and to different extents – in artists’, authors’, viewers’ and listeners’ minds, adjusting the ways in which war is visualised and canonising broader ideas about (e.g.) gender, leadership, self-sacrifice, nationhood and conflict-resolution.
The aim of our project is to foreground these interactions and explore their impacts. In a nutshell, we ask: how do war stories from different media, communities and historical periods both shape and differentiate themselves from each other? How do their interactions reflect and shape broader attitudes to war? And how do the attitudes and ideologies which they generate influence the ways in which people think, feel and behave in their day-to-day lives?
Our project brings together a wide range of Humanities and Social Science scholars, applying methodologies from Art History, Classics, Film Studies, History, International Relations and Psychology. In studying diverse habits of visualising war and interplay between conflict narratives from different periods and places, we hope to gain new insights not only into depictions of war in individual works but also into the development of local and boundary-crossing discourses of war. We are interested in the indirect impact which battle narratives have on people’s mindsets and behaviours but also in the ways they can be purposefully leveraged by those in positions of social or political power. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity in individuals and groups to harness narratives of war to prevent or mitigate against the effects of future conflict.
You can hear us talking about some of our research interests in this podcast and explore our publications and outreach work here.
Principal Investigator: Alice König ; Co-Investigator: Nicolas Wiater
Steering Group: Bridget Heal, Kenneth Mavor, Laura Mills
Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Katarina Birkedal (2020-21)
Postgraduate Research Assistants: Mia Furlong (2020-21), Zofia Guertin (2020-22), Mads Lindholmer (2020-21), Bridget Hardiman (2022), Martyna Majewska (2022), Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022), Diana Novak (2022-3), Sarah Prince, Florence Felsheim (2023-4).
Laidlaw Scholars: Aubrey George (2019-20), Sarah Gough (2021-3), Matin Moors (2021-3), Otilia Meden (2023-4).
Undergraduate Research Assistants: Katrina Drayton (2017), Margherita Coughlan (2018), Anna Coopey (2021), Jana Mauri Marlborough (2021), Holly Axford (2022), Anna Pilgrim (2023), India Goodman (2023), Kate O’Neal (2024).
IT support: Mary Woodcock Kroble
Art work: Zofia Guertin
This project has received funding from the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews, the University of St Andrews KE and Impact Fund, the Scottish Funding Council (via the St Andrews Restarting Research Fund and the St Andrews Restarting Interdisciplinary Research Fund), the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, the Classical Association, the Institute of Classical Studies, and the Imperial War Museums’ 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund.
Contact: viswar@st-andrews.ac.uk