 Conflict and security studies tend to focus on political, strategic or technological perspectives, but research into narratives and discourses of war and peace is just as important as the study of historic facts or current capabilities because stories are world building. Our habits of describing and depicting war, its aftermath, conflict resolution, peace building and peace itself reflect reality up to a point, but they also help to generate it by shaping how we think, feel, make decisions and behave. A lot of public art and museum space has been dedicated to war. Libraries and bookshops contain countless volumes of military history. There are well established traditions of war reporting and conflict photography. We talk a lot less about peace. As a result, our collective habits of visualizing peace are often limited to simple cliches and well worn troops to images of doves or UN peacekeepers to metaphors of friendship or seed sowing. These images and metaphors have value and power, but they can also restrict our understanding of peace as a complex multifaceted phenomenon. And if our understanding of peace is limited, so is our ability to build or sustain it. Talking about different manifestations and understandings of peace is an important step in empowering everyone to play a part in fostering it. For that reason, a small team of students and staff at the University of St Andrews has created the virtual Museum of Peace, showcasing different ways of visualizing peace. Our aim is to spark more conversation about what peace looks like to each of us, where it can be found how it gets represented, and what peacemaking and peacekeeping actually involve. Our aim is structured around eight rooms, looking at everything from post conflict recovery to future peace, bringing together a wide range of perspectives from different regions of the world and different disciplinary backgrounds. Our exhibits draw attention to the many different media through which ideas of peace get communicated from political rhetoric prayer and commemorative events to horror stories comedy visual art forms dance fashion social media and gaming among others. We reflect on utopian ideals of peace alongside more pragmatic understandings and everyday experiences. We examine lots of co relatives to peace and peace building, such as the fight for women's rights and access to education. And we raise important questions about the blurred boundaries between campaigning activism resistance to dominant power structures, social revolution and peacemaking. These ways in which different art forms such as painting or story sharing can foster and not just depict more peaceful futures by drawing attention to threats or generating dialogue empathy and understanding. And in inviting visitors to reflect on different habits of visualizing peace, our museum also challenges us to question the ways in which we understand, imagine and describe conflict itself. If I asked you to describe or define peace, we might hear terms such as security, justice or reconciliation. Though the specificities of each interpretation very much of our present day understanding frames peace as an end state, marked by the absence of violence, the redress of grievances and specific forms of political, economic and social order. Our museum of peace, however, has had to move beyond this macro level conceptualization to focus on more human oriented interpretations, including the moral and psychological struggle to achieve inner peace. This re visualization raises important questions about the connection between individual piece and community wider global piece. We're not simply interested in contrasting top down visualizations of peace with bottom up grass roots or everyday forms of peace and peace building, but in how they intersect justice higher degrees of inner peace can potentially radiate out into a community. So to kind of loss of inner or moral peace present security challenges at local, national and global levels. There are very few experiences of modern service members shaped by asymmetric conflicts and blurred distinctions between combatants and non combatants, high levels of individual responsibility and ambiguous decision making. As a result, there's an increased potential for moral injury. And although it may be tempting to view the growing shift towards near pure competition as an indication of the return of moral simplicity. There are other ways that service members will continue to confront scenarios that challenge their personal understandings of right and wrong. Recovery recovery from moral injury is far from uniform, but a number of exhibits in our museum of peace highlight the central role that storytelling can play, not to wipe away or obfuscate the harms of the past, but as a way of recognizing the inherent complexities of conflict and helping service members to confront and accept the root causes of their moral injuries. First of all, storytelling and story sharing can allow service members to begin repurposing their morally injurious experiences for the benefit of others. The importance of preserving or restoring internal moral peace cannot be overstated. Moral injuries are disruptive forces that provoke sentiments of not only shame or guilt, but also disillusionment. In visualizing peace as an internal state as much as an external one, our museum is not suggesting that we focus on human oriented, individualizing approaches as an alternative to traditional notions of peace as a security based end state. Rather, we want to underline their complex interrelationships, different conceptualizations of peace evolve alongside and intersect with one another, offering us new ways of framing current and future security concerns. Many items from our museum explore the idea of future peace and the factors that enable shape or challenge it with a particular focus on what fosters sustainable peace. Among other topics, our exhibits explore environmentally friendly fashion, rights based activism and artivism, music sharing, mindfulness, urban greening and education as different methods for fostering peace in sustainable ways. These alternative ways of visualizing peace have power and impact. They prompt us to look at peace with fresh eyes and present inclusive everyday solutions which are achievable by ordinary people. Take our exhibit on green Mosul, which features a powerful story of post conflict recovery and future oriented world building anchored around tree planting. We decided to feature the Mosul I associations green Mosul initiative in our museum, because it reminds us that peace building and environmental care can nourish each other. In fact, they are codependent on each other. This is an empowering and optimistic message, the planting of hope where worry and despair can take root, the nurturing of green shoots both literally and metaphorically. Our research into peace has brought to the fore the importance of bottom up or grassroots peace building. Often more sustainable than top down peace processes that are designed and implemented by national or international powers. Grassroots approaches ideally involve a wide range of local voices, including women and minority groups. They help members of the community to find common ground and shared purpose, and they empower ordinary citizens to become activists and drive forward the changes they want to see. Education is another powerful tool for fostering sustainable peace and security in post conflict areas as well as in more privileged parts of the world. As one of our exhibits explores it can help children to unlearn war, even while still living in devastated conflict zones. It can also help people displaced by word war to rebuild their own lives to become part of new communities and to forge better communities for the future. The classroom can be a wonderful place to instill hope, hoping the future, hoping a present without or a mid word and hope that comes from being part of a community and support network. As our museum underlines education not only offers young people alternatives to war and escape from conflict. It has the capacity to involve young people directly in complex conversations about past and present security challenges, empowering them not just to dream, but to help realize the kinds of peace that they want to see. The young voices we feature do not look at peace through rose tinted spectacles. They drill down into the many different challenges that make recovery from conflict so difficult and time consuming. That realism should be a great source of optimism for us, as in their tendency to see the human ahead of the politics and to communicate with compassionate understanding. But our museum exhibits underline the value of taking what young people have to say on war and peace seriously. From honey bees to hacktivism, from commercial soft toys to campaigning kinds of artwork, from pockets of peace to peace in space, our museum juxtaposes many different ways of visualizing and achieving many different kinds of peace. Our aim is to raise questions in visitors minds about how they visualize peace and what that might mean for how they go about discussing, imagining, fostering, embodying, creating or sustaining it in their daily lives and in their professional practice. We hope you enjoy visiting our museum yourselves. We'd really love to hear your feedback. And please do tell others about it.