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Repertoires of Violence: Multidisciplinary Analyses of the Representation of Peace and Conflict
1-2 July 2009, York St John University, York, UK
Report by Richard Keeble
A fascinating range of papers was presented on the second day of the conference, drawing from a wide spread of disciplines.
Peace of Yorkshire: Peter Nias
Peter Nias, from the Peace Museum, Bradford, showed his museum’s travelling PowerPoint show, Peace of Yorkshire. This highlights the extraordinary history of the peace movement in Yorkshire. To take a few examples: the Leeds Peace Association was formed in 1842 and campaigned against the Crimean War. Richard Cobden, MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire, with his Quaker colleague, John Bright, saw peace as essential for the promotion of free trade. During the late 1950s, Yorkshire men and women, such as the novelist J.B. Priestley, were heavily involved in the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Today, peace movement activities are particularly directed at Menwith Hill, the RAF/US communications and intelligence base near Harrogate, and the Fylingdales listening post. And peace gardens had been set up at the universities of Bradford, York St John and Sheffield.
Anti-War activism and the reception of the war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan in the USA and UK: Michael Drake
Michael Drake, in a paper titled “Anti-War activism and the reception of the war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan in the USA and UK”, examined the politics of grief in the context of the anti-war movement. He juxtaposed Judith Butler’s work on the “powers of mourning” with the analyses of philosopher Gillian Rose, who stressed more the politics of grief. Drake argued that the “simplistic appropriation of mourning advocated by Butler” had been endorsed by the anti-war movement. But both Butler and Rose drew attention to the function of mourning in the formation of collective imaginaries which served to imbue the body of the dead with cultural significance. Drake also highlighted the “remilitarisation” of civic life. Military recruitment was now targeting deprived areas, Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented Britain’s war making as a cause for national celebration; and local communities were being encouraged to provide home-coming parades for soldiers returning from service in Afghanistan and Iraq. The anti-war opposition was finding it difficult competing with the military’s rhetoric stressing the “performance of duty”.
Representations of Military Activities: Rachel Woodward
Rachel Woodward, of Newcastle University, explored the representations of military activities soldiers produced in their own photographs. While the content of the images varied enormously, various dominant themes emerged. These included the material effects of armed force on landscapes and the complex personal negotiations around the use of armed force and its effects on civilians.
Why aren’t you in khaki? Army clothing and the design of the civilian soldier in the First World War: Jane Tynan
Jane Tynan, of the University of the Arts, London, in a paper titled “Why aren’t you in khaki? Army clothing and the design of the civilian soldier in the First World War”, argued that military uniforms were under-researched in design history. The paper began by focusing on the khaki fever of 1914 examining the images of men in uniform in both posters and press photographs. She said: “Discourses that emphasised regulation and the mass character of the British army described the way men’s bodies could be acted upon to produce a disciplined army from a diverse group of individuals.” The shift to khaki, away from the earlier decorative displays of military uniform, represented the modernisation of the army with the stress on invisibility and camouflage in an age of surveillance. The radical changes in military clothing represented a cultural shift to uniformity. The move to mass-produced khaki was also a way in which the army dealt with the massive influx of conscripts – with the uniform also conveying an illusion of order in the face of the essential chaotic nature of warfare. Tynan stressed the interdisciplinary nature of her work which linked concerns of social and design history to consider the visual, textual and material presence of uniform in British culture.
KEYNOTE. Representing apartheid trauma: the victim hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Annelies Verdoolaege
In her keynote address, Annelies Verdoolaege, of Ghent University, examined the discourse of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some 22,000 victims’ statements were gathered covering 37,000 violations. Around 2,000 apartheid victims then appeared before the Human Rights Violations Committee and told gruesome stories about murder, torture, abduction, rape and arson. Some 83 victims’ hearings were held over 15 months – in town halls, churches, schools. They represented a significant validation of subjective experience. They also often proved cathartic for survivors who felt respected as human beings. These narratives formed just one layer of the “TRC archive”. In addition, the testimonies were transcribed and posted on to the internet, recorded and edited for radio and television, and commented on in thousands of books, documentaries, poems, novels and theatre plays. The “reconciliation discourse” was to a large extent guided (and here Verdoolaege drew on Foucault’s theories relating to “regimes of truth”). But it could also be rejected and Verdoolaege was keen to stress the constructive role of the commission in promoting a new vocabulary of peace – so crucial in dealing with the trauma of apartheid.
Peace Journalism: Richard Keeble
In a paper on peace journalism, I argued that most of its leading theorists remained too closely attached to the notion of journalism as a privileged professional activity rather than seeing it as radical political practice. They also tended to be too utopian in suggesting improvements in professional routines and reforms in journalism training could bring about significant changes. Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, in their seminal text Peace Journalism (2005) rightly highlighted the corporate media’s over-reliance on elite sources and its focus on events rather than process. They also pointed out how journalists’ “objectivity” conventions ultimately served to marginalise voices calling for peace, restraint and dialogue. They even suggested peace journalism was “revolutionary” but they failed to carry this point to its logical conclusion. Change would, in fact, only come if based on a radical political analysis of media and society. This would incorporate an awareness of the possibilities of journalistic activities both within and outside the corporate media as part of a broader political strategy to democratise the media and society in general. The strategy would also involve a radical broadening of the definition of journalism to include intellectuals, campaigners and citizens – all of them articulating their ideas within the dominant and alternative public spheres.
Empathy, sympathy and the Image of the Other: David Webb
“Empathy, sympathy and the image of the other” was the title of a paper presented by David Webb, of Leeds Metropolitan University. The paper examined how individuals might change from being people who did not kill or torture into people who did. Webb commented: “This often startling change to potential or actual killer or torturer may depend to a great extent on the images of the ‘other’ that they are encouraged to develop. Intense training sessions, focused on the principle that obeying orders is of paramount important (even at the risk of personal injury or death) and extensive use of various forms of propaganda and conditioning are used to overcome any feelings of sympathy and empathy that may exist for the declared enemy.”
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