Dr Alice König has recently secured funding from the Institute for Classical Studies and the University of St Andrews’ Impact and Innovation Fund to collaborate for a second time with professional theatre company NMT Automatics. Their previous collaboration (also involving the School of Classics’ Centre for the Public Understanding of Greek and Roman Drama) led to the development of a play called Tempus Fugit: Troy and Us. In that play, NMTA deployed the figures of Hector and Andromache from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad to explore contemporary British military culture and the legacy of the UK’s involvement in the 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan.[i] The ancient and modern narratives that make up the plot interact with each other in ways that question past and present habits of visualising war (as action-packed, thrilling, necessary, purposeful, fulfilling) and women (as home-makers, naïve spectators, patient, impotent, peripheral). More broadly, Tempus Fugit invites audiences and fellow-storytellers to consider what the (re)telling of old and new conflict stories can do for us: it can reinforce cliches and embed received worldviews, or it can make us more critical consumers and narrators, alert not only to the powerful influence that dominant narrative traditions have had over time but also to narrative’s power to visualise things differently, driving alternative kinds of decision-making and behaviours.
Building on this collaboration, Dr König has embarked on a second project with NMTA to develop a play focused on peace and peacebuilding, designed to address gaps in our peace literacy, both ancient and modern. The best-known narratives and representations of peace to survive from antiquity have centered around relatively narrow, primarily top-down, militarising conceptions of conflict resolution and transition: the conquest and subjugation of one nation or leader by another, celebrations of victory that parade the defeat of one’s foe(s), the establishment of political treaties, alliances or ‘friendships’ between states or ruling powers, the triumphant return of celebrated warriors to welcoming homes and everlasting glory, and the building of official monuments and memorials to commemorate select people and events.[ii]Scholarship has tended to perpetuate these storytelling habits, both in paying far less attention to ancient peace than war,[iii] and in homing in on the discourses of peace most visible in our sources, which identify peacebuilding primarily as securitisation, as taking place almost exclusively within ‘high politics’, and as the work of a privileged, male elite.[iv] By contrast, we see much less – both in our ancient sources and in modern analysis of Classical antiquity – of the long-term, intergenerational impacts of war’s aftermath on ordinary people and local communities, of personal struggles (with finances, housing, health and relationships) in the wake of armed violence, of the day-to-day work that civilians must have undertaken to find ‘pockets of peace’ during a long siege or after the immediate danger had passed, of the challenges that victims of wartime rape likely faced in patriarchal societies, of the adaptations that those displaced by conflict would have had to make, or indeed of the absence of anything amounting to ‘peace’ for those enslaved during conquest.[v]
That is not to say that none of these manifestations of peace-searching or peace-making were present in antiquity; rather, they were not part of the dominant discourses of post-conflict transition that gained traction – discourses that figured peace as an end-goal (victory, subjugation, power, spoils) and as a state (ceasefire, security, luxury), rather than as a process or endeavour that involved collaborative work and whole communities. If we pay attention only to these dominant discourses, we are missing big gaps in ancient peace history; and so the key question becomes ‘how can we address those gaps and build a more comprehensive picture of ancient experiences, understandings and approaches – of how ordinary people conceptualised and managed peace’s absence, how they helped themselves and others recover and rebuild in conflict’s wake, and how they sought to protect themselves against future conflict or even worked to avoid it?’ Peace history has focused for far too long on the macro-politics that were driven and narrated by a handful of powerful men; it is time that we invested more effort in excavating a people’s history of peace across antiquity, and one way to do this is by bringing modern and ancient peace studies into dialogue with each other. This in turn has the potential to contribute to the ongoing development of modern peace theory and practice, by offering parallels and contrasts rooted in the deep past to think with in the present and for the future.
In the absence of much ancient source material for personal, local, everyday experiences of peace and peacebuilding, we have to turn to creative research methods, such as those deployed by novelists like Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes, who blend fictional storytelling with research into both ancient and modern experiences of conflict to foreground unheard voices and visualise what marginalised people’s experiences might have been. While difficult to do well (with ethical integrity, as well as methodological rigour and historical accuracy), this kind of ‘speculative history’ or ‘critical fabulation’ is a valuable tool in our toolbox, long honed by artists in the storytelling industry but also starting to gain more credibility within academia.[vi] Up to a point, of course, all historiography is speculative: no matter how much evidence we have at our finger-tips, we inevitably end up second-guessing many aspects of the events we are trying to reconstruct.[vii] When done more consciously and creatively, however, as a way to reconstruct aspects and voices of the past that we cannot otherwise bring to life, ‘speculative history’ involves the careful cross-fertilisation of (for instance) well-documented experiences from a range of modern peace processes with ancient source material that keeps us anchored in ancient contexts and cultures. In other words, speculative history involves the generation of instructive, intertextual dialogues between ancient and modern case studies, with the two informing each other – to the point where a plausibly authentic narrative about the past becomes not only possible but a positive new contribution, able to mitigate some of the biases and gaps in the histories we have been able to tell so far. Not all speculative history deploys obviously fictional storytelling methods, of course; but the turn to creative narrative forms (imaginary letters, autobiographies, dramas, and so on) is increasingly finding its way into classroom practice as a valuable historiographic exercise, as well as into collaborations between researchers and storytelling professionals.
Dr König’s new collaboration with NMTA aims to expand our understanding of both ancient and modern discourses of peace and peacebuilding by capitalising on the world-building potential of the performing arts. The play’s plot is still in development, but as NMTA envisage it, it will oscillate between ancient Greece and 1940s Crete, deploying the myth of the minotaur to explore – and critique – both ancient and modern conceptions of peace and peacebuilding. As well as putting ancient approaches to conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery and conflict prevention under the microscope (for instance, narratives of divine intervention, sacrificial rituals, costly appeasement strategies, ongoing othering and dehumanisation of ‘the enemy’, and regular recurrence to violence), it will incorporate and interrogate modern concepts and systems (from UN-led efforts and international justice processes to more local therapeutic work and theories of self-care) in order to prompt reflection on which practices have had what kinds of impacts in the past, and what we might advocate for or seek to invest in for the future.
In short, while Tempus Fugit drew on ancient Greek myth to focus attention on past and present habits of visualising women and/in war (addressing a significant imbalance in war-storytelling), NMTA’s new play is designed to expand our peace literacy through a dialogue between ancient paradigms and modern theory and practice. One key goal is to help make peace and peacebuilding more visible in popular culture, a much-needed narrative corrective to the countless militarisms present in our everyday lives. If one were to type ‘war films’ into a search engine, hundreds would be listed; we have long-established traditions of war reporting and war art; and high street book shops routinely have ‘military history’ sections.[viii] By contrast, representations and explorations of peace and peacebuilding are far less prominent: book stores rarely have ‘peace’ sections, there is no such genre as ‘peace films’, and while ‘peace art’, ‘peace photography’, and ‘peace reporting’ have gained more traction in recent years,[ix] they are still vastly ‘out-gunned’ by more war-oriented alternatives. As with our ancient sources, this dearth of peace-storytelling is a distortion of reality; while war dominates most genres and media, peace has always been yearned for, sought, made and maintained in many different, ingenious, draining, improvised and painstaking ways; just less visibly and less audibly than our conflict narratives suggest. These gaps in our storytelling habits have real-world consequences, both for our general peace literacy and – following on from that – for our ability to make and sustain peace. A key premise at the heart of the Visualising War and Peace project is that stories are world-shaping. The goal of this drama collaboration is to tell a mix of ancient peace stories in ways that will prompt broader reflection on what peace means to people in different contexts and what different forms peacebuilding can take, from the personal to the political.
References
Ager, S. ed. (2020) A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity, Bloomsbury.
Clark, J.H. & Turner, B., eds. (2018) Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society, Leiden
Consiglio, F., König, A. & Oberholzter, J. (2023) ‘Visualising Peace: A Virtual Museum’, E-International Relations: https://www.e-ir.info/2023/01/01/visualising-peace-a-virtual-museum/
Cornwell, H. (2017) Pax and the Politics of Peace, Oxford
De Souza, P. (2008) ‘Parta victoriis pax: Roman emperors as peacemakers’, in P. De Souza & J. France, eds (2008) War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, Cambridge, 76-106
Galtung, J. (1969) ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3, 167-191
Gittings, J. (2012) The Glorious Art of Peace: paths to peace in a new age of war, Oxford
Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26 (12.2), 1-14.
McWatters, C.S. (2016) ‘Speculation, history, speculative history’, Accounting History Review 26.1, 1-4
Möller, F. (2019) Peace Photography, Springer Link
Moloney, E.P. & Williams, M.A. eds. (2017) Peace and Reconciliation in the Classical World, Routledge
Raaflaub, K.A. (2007) War and Peace in the Ancient World, Blackwell Publishers
Raaflaub, K.A. (2009) ‘Conceptualizing and Theorizing Peace in Ancient Greece’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 139.2, 225-250
Raaflaub, K.A. (2016) Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories, John Wiley & Sons
Richmond, O. (2022) ‘Artpeace: validating power, mobilising resistance and imagining emancipation’, Journal of Resistance Studies 8.2, 74-110
Sordi, M. (1985) La pace nel mondo antico, Milan
[i] Dunne and D’Young developed Tempus Fugit with director Andres Velasquez and dramaturg Mairin O’Hagan, as they discuss in this Visualising War and Peace podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNqPqyXONBk.
[ii] I.e. ‘negative peace’ (the absence of war) not ‘positive peace’ (as defined in Galtung 1969). De Souza 2008 surveys these trends across the Roman Imperial period; contributions in Raaflaub 2016 cover ancient Egypt, India, China and Greece.
[iii] Moloney/Williams 2017: 1-2.
[iv] Key contributions to ancient peace studies (several of which reinforce rather than bucking these trends) include Sordi 1985; Raaflaub 2007, 2009 and 2016a; Moloney/Williams 2017; Cornwell 2017; Ager 2020.
[v] See contributions in Clark/Turner 2018 for some rare bottom-up as well as top-down analysis of experiences of defeat across antiquity.
[vi] Hartman 2008 discusses the power of creative, arts-based approaches (‘critical fabulation’) to address the challenges of excavating slave histories, given ‘the violence of the archive and the way power is registered through absences and silences, the obliteration of lives, all the things that we could not know’..
[vii] McWatters 2016.
[viii] Gittings 2012: 5-6. It is this shortfall which the Visualising War and Peace project’s virtual Museum of Peace aims to address (https://peacemuseum.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/mission-statement/); Consiglio/König/Oberholzter 2023.
[ix] Richmond 2022; Möller 2019.
