In 2025, the Visualising War and Peace project is seeking funding to establish the first ever Ancient Peace Studies Network (APSN). Below, you can read our vision for this network.
Alice König, 5th January 2025
‘…we need to regard peace, not war, as the Glorious Art which demands our attention.’
John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace: Paths to Peace in a New Age of War, Oxford 2012
Our ability to build peace is determined by how well we understand what it means to different people in diverse contexts. At present, most of us are far more ‘literate’ in war than peace, thanks in part to the influence that ancient Mediterranean war-storytelling has long had, via both military history and popular culture. By building a team of peace researchers with expertise in different ancient cultures, the Ancient Peace Studies Network will not only transform ancient peace studies; it will also contribute to modern peace studies and wider contemporary peace literacy.
THE PROBLEM: The study of antiquity is dominated by warfare; by contrast, ancient ideas of peace and approaches to peacebuilding have received little attention. Compounding this, there has been a tendency amongst the few studies that exist to follow the lead of a narrow range of elite, war-oriented sources, and thus to focus on highly privileged, geopolitical and militarising understandings and activities (see e.g. contributions in Moloney/Williams 2017; Raaflaub 2007, 2016; de Souza/France 2008; Clark/Turner 2018; Ager 2020 is unusual in looking beyond military contexts, but still focuses on elite perspectives).
In his Res Gestae (a record of his ‘Achievements’), the emperor Augustus presented the ‘peace’ he claimed to have conferred on the Roman world as victory, pacification, securitisation and colonisation (Cornwell 2017). Peacebuilding, he insisted, was the work of powerful leaders; and its goals were Roman protection, enrichment and hegemony. Such macro-political, top-down, self-interested and violent ideas of peace and peacebuilding are visible in many other settings around the ancient Mediterranean world, from monuments to coins, military manuals to epic poetry.
In focusing on them, modern scholarship has helped to reinforce and perpetuate ancient habits of visualising peace that reflected the interests of the powerful few, not the wider experiences of populations at large. As a result, we understand very little of the wide-ranging, intergenerational impacts of war’s aftermath on ordinary people and local communities in different ancient contexts; of the day-to-day work that civilians must have undertaken to find ‘pockets of peace’ amid conflict; of the adaptations that those displaced by war must have made; the challenges that victims of wartime rape likely faced in patriarchal societies; or the absence of anything amounting to ‘peace’ for those enslaved during conquest.
That is not to say that none of these kinds of peace-searching or peace-making were present in antiquity; rather, they were not part of the dominant discourses of peace and peacebuilding that gained traction then, and they have remained marginalised ever since. Because they mirrored the concerns of people in power, these dominant discourses had a profound impact on real-world events and individual lives; however, they offer only superficial insights into a much more diverse history of how peace was envisioned, experienced, sought, lost, and re-made by ordinary people in ‘bottom-up’ ways, in different periods and places across antiquity.
The visions of peace promoted by the likes of Augustus have shaped later (not just ancient) conceptions and approaches. If we do not look beyond them, it is not only our understanding of antiquity that risks being limited but also our modern peace imaginaries.
OBJECTIVES: As developments in modern peace studies have underlined, attention to grassroots contexts is vital for sustainable peacebuilding, because it brings top-down, geopolitical theories into dialogue with personal experiences (Mac Ginty 2010, 2014, Paffenholz 2015, Lee 2021). Our hypothesis is that, if we can excavate a more inclusive picture of ground-level understandings and approaches across diverse ancient communities, we can write a new history of ancient peace and peacebuilding that will be field-changing in three transdisciplinary ways:
(1) it will accelerate a much-needed de-militarisation of ancient-world scholarship, revolutionising ancient conflict studies in particular by de-centering battle/soldiering and foregrounding the slow, hard labour of everyday peacebuilding;
(2) it will transform ancient peace studies by developing rigorous new methodologies for reconstructing non-elite conceptions and experiences across different contexts;
(3) it will contribute to modern peace studies, both by offering a more diverse, people-centred ‘prequel’ to the study of peacebuilding in later times, and by focusing attention on the roles played by narrative and discourse in shaping how peace was/is conceived and made.
A fundamental premise of my prior research on ‘visualising war’ is that stories are world-building: narratives of conflict not only reflect reality (up to a point); they also help to shape it by influencing how we think, feel and behave, both as individuals and societies (König 2025a, 2025b). In focusing attention on what photojournalist Tim Hetherington called the ‘feedback loop’ between narrative and reality (Gilks 2023), our collective work within the APSN will shed new light on how and why some habits of visualising – and therefore pursuing – peace became particularly dominant across the ancient world (with long-lasting legacies); and it will also contribute new insights into the complex interrelationship between representation and reality that are relevant for our understanding and building of peace today.
APPROACH: The interdisciplinary breadth of the APSN enables us to research diverse experiences and discourses of peace all around the ancient world, from the 9th c. BCE to the 6th c. CE. While some published scholarship has juxtaposed different forms and ideas of peace and peacebuilding from across antiquity (e.g. Raaflaub 2016), there has been no systematic study either of their diachronic evolution or their cross-cultural interplay. Building on methodologies for tracing cross-cultural interactions advanced in König/Langlands/Uden 2020, and drawing on a much wider range of textual, visual and material sources than has been examined to date, our network members will not only uncover how peace was imagined and pursued in a range of individual ancient communities; via comparative analysis of evidence from e.g. ancient Assyria to Roman Britain, Ptolemaic Egypt to late-antique Gaul, the Kingdom of Judah to early-Christian Ethiopia, we will pose new questions about the ever-shifting dialogue between local and transcultural habits of visualising, making and keeping peace.
Although grassroots experiences of war’s aftermath and post-conflict recovery are less easily discernible for antiquity than, e.g., the politics of treaty-making or triumphal traditions, they can be reconstructed both by reading against the grain of elite-oriented sources, and by bringing an array of ancient evidence into dialogue with recent developments in modern peace studies, applying knowledge and approaches from contemporary research in novel ways to ancient history. Methodologically, we take inspiration from recently-developed techniques for exploring popular culture and subaltern voices in antiquity (e.g. Grig 2017; Moss 2021); from decolonising and feminist approaches in International Relations (e.g. Te Maihāroa/Ligaliga/Devere 2022; Wibben 2011; Henry 2024); research on ‘bottom-up’, ‘local’, ‘everyday’ peace/peacebuilding in the 21st century (e.g. Mac Ginty 2021; Ejdus 2021); and recent innovations in speculative history (McWatters 2016) and ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman 2008) which have re-animated the voices and experiences of people previously written out of mainstream histories (e.g. Barker 2018; Haynes 2019).
Blending emic and etic approaches (i.e. understandings from within antiquity and perspectives beyond it), our research also draws on modern case studies to shed new light on ancient lives. For instance, by bringing Livy’s History of Romeinto dialogue with first-hand testimonies by victims of wartime rape and forced displacement in Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan, or by reading Josephus’ account of the Jewish Wars alongside Black and slave histories of the American civil war, we can (1) identify some of the voices which our ancient sources have ignored or erased; (2) map significant differences as well as overlaps between ancient and modern articulations of peace and peacebuilding across different contexts; and (3) expand our understanding of the everyday kinds of ‘peace processes’ that ordinary people likely engaged in around the ancient Mediterranean as they tried to resolve, recover from or prevent conflict, such as private memorial practices or the emergence of local networks of practical and moral support.
Our research is also informed by theories of intertextuality and interdiscursivity pioneered by the University of St Andrews’ Literary Interactions project (https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/literaryinteractions/) and recent Visualising War publications (https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/visualising-war/). In particular, we draw on recent theorising about the role played by intertextuality in cementing and propagating particularly dominant discourses of conflict that structure and govern our daily lives (König 2025a). By analysing not only individual texts but also the cumulative interplay between them, we can better understand both the emergence of influential peace imaginaries and also their real-world ramifications: for instance the implications for both men and women of ancient representations of peace as seductively female; how military and civilian lives were impacted by the normalisation of conflict as a default state; what influence recurring links between peace and plunder had on modes of conflict resolution; and how win-lose conceptualisations of one person’s victory as another’s defeat impacted people near and far from different centres of power.
Drawing also on methodologies for analysing the ‘feedback loop’ between narrative and reality (König 2025b), this discourse-focused research connects to ‘the narrative turn’ in modern conflict studies and to emerging work on the potential of peace storytelling to drive positive change (e.g. Cobb 2013; Simmons 2024). This will lead not only to an enhanced understanding of the real-world legacies of ancient discourses of peace but also to increased awareness of the relationship between the peace/war stories we tell and the worlds we build (or destroy) in the 21st century.
OUTCOMES: Rather than setting out with a pre-determined definition of ‘peace’, our research and outputs are designed to uncover and illuminate the diversity of ways in which it was understood, depicted and forged in different contexts around the ancient world, raising questions in the process about contemporary visualisations. To this end, APSN members will co-author a book entitled New Visions of Ancient Peace. Structured around 100 concise analyses of different articulations of peace and peacebuilding – personal and political, near and far from the battlefield – the book will juxtapose well-known visions (as seen in e.g. propagandistic speeches or victory celebrations) with less familiar material (e.g. discussions of conflict resolution in domestic/civilian settings, or funerary art that reveals aspects of post-conflict recovery), amplifying unheard voices and placing everyday experiences alongside geopolitical discourses.
This collaborative project will promote knowledge-exchange across the network and help us to address a wider set of shared research questions, for instance: (1) how variable social status impacted ancient conceptions and experiences of peace/peacebuilding; (2) how prevailing habits of visualising peace informed everyday life, and vice versa; and (3) how local and transcultural discourses of peace interacted and evolved over time. As well as revolutionising ancient peace studies, it will supply modern peace studies with a transformative ‘deep history’ of concepts and approaches that have informed visualisations of peace and methods of peacebuilding ever since; and it will bring ancient and modern peace imaginaries into dialogue in ways that centre and promote care for ordinary people’s lives.
In short, the establishment of an Ancient Peace Studies Network represents a watershed moment for ancient peace (and war) studies, both methodologically and conceptually. The collaborative research planned under its aegis will make it impossible in future to ignore non-elite experiences; amplify the diversity of ways in which peace was visualised and built across different cultures and contexts in antiquity; illuminate the complex, dialogic relationship between ancient discourses of peace and lived realities; and demonstrate the transformative potential of new peace-storytelling that foregrounds ordinary people’s lives.
References
- Ager ed. (2020) A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity, Bloomsbury
- Barker 2018, The Silence of the Girls, Penguin
- Basham (2020) ‘Everyday modalities of militarization: beyond unidirectional, state-centric, and simplistic accounts of state violence’, Critical Military Studies 10(2), 142-6
- Beier (2011) ‘Everyday zones of militarization’, in Beier ed. The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South, New York (Palgrave Macmillan): 1–15
- Clark & Turner eds. (2018) Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society, Leiden.
- Cobb (2013) Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution, OUP
- De Souza & France eds. (2008) War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, Cambridge
- Ejdus (2021) ‘Revisiting the Local Turn in Peacebuilding’ in Kustermans, Sauer & Segaert, eds. A Requiem for Peacebuilding? Palgrave Macmillan
- Fry & Souillac (2022) ‘Indigenous Approaches to Peacemaking’ in Mac Ginty & Wanis-St. John eds. Contemporary Peacemaking, Palgrave Macmillan.
- Gittings (2012) The Glorious Art of Peace: Paths to Peace in a New Age of War, Oxford.
- Grig (2017) Popular Culture in the Ancient World, CUP
- Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26 (12.2), 1-14
- Haynes (2019) A Thousand Ships, Pan Macmillan
- König 2025a ‘(Inter)visualising War’, König & Wiater eds. Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: interplay between conflict narratives in different media and genres, Routledge.
- König (2025b) ‘War Stories are World-Building: Tracing the Feedback Loop between Narrative and Reality, from antiquity to today’; König & Wiater (eds.) Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean, Routledge.
- Mac Ginty, R. (2021), Everyday Peace: How so-called ordinary people can disrupt conflict, Oxford
- McWatters (2016) ‘Speculation, history, speculative history’, Accounting History Review 26.1, 1-4.
- Moloney & Williams eds. (2017) Peace and Reconciliation in the Classical World, Routledge.
- Moss (2021), ‘Between the Lines: Looking for the Contributions of Enslaved Literate Laborers in a Second Century Text (P. Berol. 11632)’, Studies in Late Antiquity, 5. 3, 432-452.
- Raaflaub ed. (2007) War and Peace in the Ancient World, Blackwell Publishers.
- Raaflaub ed. (2016) Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories, John Wiley & Sons.
- Simmons (2024) Narrating Peace: how to tell a conflict story, Routledge
- Te Maihāroa, Ligaliga & Devere (2022) Decolonising Peace and Conflict Studies through Indigenous Research, Palgrave Macmillan.
- Wibben (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, Routledge.