This episode dives deep into ancient peace history, as Alice interviews Professor Polly Low, from Durham University, and Dr Hannah Cornwell, from the University of Birmingham.

Polly is a historian of ancient Greece, with a particular interest in political history and interstate relations. Her 2007 book on Interstate Relations in Classical Greece examined the norms and ethics that shaped relations between Greek city states, the scope and enforcement of ‘international law’, and the complexities of diplomacy across the Classical period. An expert on Greek inscriptions, she has published on many other aspects of Greek political history – including imperialism, political mechanisms for restoring or ensuring stability, discourses of victory and defeat, and the commemoration of the war dead in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.

Hannah’s research focuses on Roman socio-political history, and she is particularly interested in Roman imperialism, discourses of power, ideas of peace and approaches to diplomacy. Her 2017 book Pax and the Politics of Peace examined the two generations that spanned the collapse of the Republic and the Augustan period in order to understand how the concept of pax Romana evolved, as a central ideology of Roman imperialism. She has also published multiple articles and chapters on the representation of Roman peace-makers in literary accounts, on negotiation and diplomacy during the Roman civil wars, physical sites of diplomatic practice, and the performance and theatre of diplomacy – among other topics.

In this episode, we explore Greek and Roman understandings of peace and approaches to peacemaking. Polly and Hannah discuss the sources available to us, whose experiences of peace they particularly foreground, and what they can tell us about how ideas of peace evolved across antiquity. We consider the relationship between peacemaking and imperialism, habits of truce-making, the intricacies of diplomacy, and peace as a performance. The episode covers several hundred years of history, considering civil war contexts as well as interstate relations, and differences between democratic Athens and Rome under the Principate. We hope you enjoy the conversation. It's a long one, because of the ground we cover, so we'd suggest you listen in two halves!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Alice interviews Lauren Benton, Professor of History and Law at Yale University. Prof Benton specialises in global legal history and the history of European empires. She has a raft of publications to her name, on the intersection between the British empire and the origins of international law, on piracy and protectionism, and on slavery and colonisation, among other topics.

Her work in this space has involved researching many forms of violence that fall short of full-blown war, and this has culminated in her most recent book, published in 2024 by Princeton University Press, titled They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Covering 500 years of history, from 1400-1900, it shines a spotlight on the many forms of violence (from raiding and enslaving to small wars and sudden massacres, all hallmarks of European imperialism) that regularly took place during times of so-called peace – calling into question how we categorise and define both peace and war.

In the podcast we dig into the book's findings, as Lauren outlines her interest in writing a different kind of global history which incorporates different cultures and perspectives and which looks beyond 'great battles' and the classic war stories we are all used to reading.

She helps us grapple with the whole spectrum of what she calls 'violence at the threshold of war and peace', noting that so-called 'small' wars have never had small impacts on the people involved. We discuss truces and their potential to drive, not just end, conflict; and Lauren outlines the violence inherent in many peace-keeping responses and 'protection emergencies', which securitise, other and control people, especially in the context of imperial power.

Lauren draws attention to the role that domestic households have long played in the 'constant drumbeat' of recurring violence that accompanies imperialism, and also to the intersection of 'regimes of armed peace' and racism. We discuss ancient and modern examples, reflecting on how blurred the boundary between war and peace often is. And we discuss what is at stake in exactly how we categorise and name different forms of violence, as e.g. full-blown war, insurgency, a 'special operation', or peacekeeping.

Lauren underlines the extent to which we continue to anticipate and accept ‘small wars’ as ‘a structural, even expected, condition of interpolity relations’; and she notes the tragic irony of our assumption that it is only by conducting this kind of supposedly ‘protective’ violence that we might achieve future peace.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation about recurring patterns of conflict that history often overlooks. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Beryl Pong, an expert on 20th-century and contemporary war. Beryl is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence. An affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of English, her research is very interdisciplinary, combining literary and historical studies with visual politics and an interest in emerging technologies. Her first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: for the Duration (published in 2020 by Oxford University Press) brings together her research on wartime literature, film and art and looks specifically at how people articulated and navigated temporal anxieties in the context of WWII. Beryl's interest in space and time, and in literary, sound and visual cultures, is also key to her current research on drone warfare. In 2024 she co-edited a book on Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology; and she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture at Cambridge, which explores how drones are impacting the way we see and relate to our world.

The episode starts by diving into some WWII literature to explore the concept of chronophobia: a dread of both past and future, coloured by the in-between-ness of a long period of conflict that followed on from the First World War and led into the Cold War. As Beryl explains, anxieties about past and future are common to many wartime experiences, but they take on some specific resonances during WWII. Along the way, we also explore 'micro temporalities' during wartime, such as the anxiety that builds during a day about what night-time air raids might bring.

We move from discussing 20th-century 'war in the skies' to discussion of the impact that drone technologies are having on how we visualise war itself, as well as how people in conflict zones get viewed. As Beryl underlines, drones promote habits of viewing that are often top-down, imperial and securitising, with a host of real-world consequences for different people on the ground. We discuss the importance of countering this with more bottom-up ways of looking at contemporary wartime experiences, and this leads to some conversation about the roles that art can play in showing us war from new perspectives. This podcast connects to conversations in previous episodes with Julian Wright, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox and Paul Lushenko and Jerilyn Packer. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin