 Okay. Welcome everybody who's here with us in person and who's also joined us on Zoom. This is the inaugural event for the Sir Michael Howard Center's new directions in the history of warfare and violence program. I'm very excited about this event taking place. Just very briefly, my name is Dr. Mark Condos. I'm a lecturer in war studies here at KCL and I'm the director of the Sir Michael Howard Center. So this year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Department of War Studies by Sir Michael Howard and it seems only fitting that the Sir Michael Howard Center should take this opportunity to reflect and build on his remarkable achievements and legacies. And I think Sir Michael Howard's greatest contribution to the history of war was his insistence on moving beyond the battlefield. In order to examine the wider social, cultural and political contexts in which wars were fought. So he wrote about the legal, the moral and philosophical implications of war and throughout his distinguished career he sought to develop new approaches to understanding the impact of war on society. So that's what this seminar series is about. It's about building on the pioneering legacy of Michael Howard and the series more broadly is going to bring together scholars from the UK and abroad to reflect on the current state of the art and history of war and to develop new and innovative ways of moving beyond contemporary paradigms. So to kick off this series I am very pleased to introduce our rather distinguished panel of scholars here with me who all work on histories related to war and violence. So our first panelist on the far left here is Professor Susan Carruthers from the University of War. Professor Carruthers specializes in US and international history with particular expertise in the role of media in war, cold war culture and colonial counterinsurgency across the 20th and 24th centuries. Her work is interested in how individuals and societies have made sense of conflict and its aftermath. She's the author of several books including Winning Hearts and Minds, The Media at War, Cold War Captives and most recently The Good Occupation, though I believe she also has a new book just about to come out. Sorry can you tell us the name of the book? It is called Dear John Love and Loyalty in War Time America. I'm sure many people will be looking forward to reading that once it hits the shelves. Our second panelist this evening is Professor Tar Kawi. Professor Kar Kawi is a professor of international relations and his work draws upon interdisciplinary approaches to reimagine the relationship between modern war, the armed forces and sight. Professor Kar Kawi's work in particular has focused on imperial and global histories of war and often the neglected and marginalized significance of the way war has been theorized, understood and practiced across the global south. He's written extensively on imperial warfare, colonial armies, so-called small wars and counterinsurgency, the war on terror and the Cold War and global order. His most recent book Soldiers of Empire came out with Cambridge University Press in 2017 and examines the multicultural composition of armies in British Asia during the Second World War with a particular emphasis on the cosmopolitan character of both India and British soldiers. Our third panelist is Professor Kim Wagner from the Mary University of London. Professor Wagner is a professor of global and imperial history whose work examines the interactions between race, culture and violence throughout the British Empire with a particular focus on exemplary violence and repression in India. He's the author of numerous books including Taghi, Banditry and the British in early 19th century, Rumors and Rebels, A New History of the Indian Uprising of 1857, The Skull of Alembeg, The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 and most recently Amritsar of 1919, An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre. Professor Wagner is also currently working on a new project about the 1906 Wood Dockwood Massacre committed by American soldiers in the Philippines. And last but not least we're joined by Dr. Matthew Ford from the University of Sussex. Dr. Ford is a senior lecturer at International Relations whose research focuses on military innovation, socio-technical change and the epistemology of battle and strategy. In addition to his numerous journal articles, Dr. Ford is the author of Weapon of Choice which came out first at LUP in 2017 which examines the evolution of western technological innovation in small arms during the 20th century. An alumnus of this department here, Dr. Ford is also founding editor of the Open Access Peer Review Journal, the British Journal for Military History. So thank you all very much for coming speak today in such weird circumstances, these hybrid events. I imagine for many of you it's probably one of the first speaking events, public speaking events we've had since the pandemic began. I'm asking you to prepare a few opening comments about the question of how we might write more global histories of war which are more attentive to previous marginalized perspectives and voices, whether these be from gender history, histories of race or cultural history, and also the ways these approaches and bringing these approaches more into the study of the history of war might change the way we understand war itself. So I will stop talking now, I will turn it over to you and if you wouldn't mind getting a starter professor for others. Sure, do you want me to stay here or? Wherever you're most comfortable, honestly. I'll just stay here, okay so I would like to thank Mark for his invitation to participate in war studies, 60 of the Earth Day festivities, and I'd also like to thank my fellow panelists to have a view and they have on Zoom that we can't see for this opportunity to reflect on the study of war. So Mark asked us a few weeks ago to formulate about 10 minutes work piece of overview remarks on quotes, big changes in how we conceptualize the history of war and violence over the past several decades. His request prompted various, I'm sure, somewhat cognitive thoughts, including how much place I am to reflect back on 60 years of war studies, not all of which I'd like to stress. I personally witnessed, I did just have a birthday in the chair but it wasn't that one, certainly very hard for me, that birthday. But then there's also that pretty first person plural quote unquote, how we conceptualize the history of war and violence, which immediately invites me to talk about who we. So rather than engaging in we speak, I'll frame my opening remarks or the first part of them in more autobiographical terms, and I do this not I'd like to think because I'm a total must assist, but because I do think that the personal shared slight on larger shifts in academia and the study of war. So I think my own story isn't idiosyncratic, but really quite indicative of some quite substantial shifts in the academy over 30 or more years. So I went to be a named British university to study international history of politics in the late 1980s. In my field as both an undergraduate and graduate student, I was never taught either by or about women. Gender was simply not a category of analysis recognized by my instructors. To the extent that the study of war was intersectional back then, that was what we talked about things being intersectional back then, it's solidly occupied the crossroads between diplomatic and military history. It was mostly concerned with change of events, decisions, actions, inactional accidents that led up to the outbreak of major war, not with the phenomenology of armed conflict or its aftermath. The many violences of empire were nowhere on the radar. My undergraduate degree program was unself-reflexibly wedded towards Sarastina memory core, the Chapson Math School of International History, preoccupied with monarchs, generals and statesmen. Finally, a special subject that I took on propaganda involved with the two was regarded by the history department's own elder statesman as dangerously subversive and walking specifically rigorous as it involved watching movies as well as studying more conventional written sources. And it's focused on propaganda, interestingly, largely as a phenomenon that was psychological, social and cultural, even if you weren't invited to theorize these things. For all its limitations, that course and that course alone set me on the road to pursuing it after it and becoming an academic. And I spent much of the subsequent 30 years, launched in the 1930s and 1950s, studying violence through a shifting set of optics. As Mark School of Ohio noted, I wrote my book and had my first PhD on British Royal Country Insurgency. At a time, I would add when no one was very interested in learning how to get soup with a knife and tie a jambore in a layer had yet to be rediscovered. And in that book and the next one, The Media of War, my interest centered on issues of representation on the circulation of public stories, images and meanings about conflict and its meanings. Early in my career, so I'm thinking here about the first decade, I encountered a great deal of overt male skepticism about my bona fides as a scholar of war. I still remember a review of The Media of War that the analyst follows. I've written it down, but I don't need to write it down, so it's a bit of a burden to me. Okay, let's whisper others one of our dreams. Has never heard a shot behind in anger, dot, dot, dot. But of course, I've devastated not only to be sure of my doctorate, but by everything else that was bound up in this completely humiliating put down of course, a bit of deeply, deeply revealing. So I think that's very hesitant and cautious, thinking that there is more acceptance, 25 or more so years along, that are more than even the event of the office. It's for a veteran to write concitefully about war. Those civilian scholars, I debate if female ones more particularly, continue to be subject to the criticism that they can't possibly more talking about if they themselves never served in uniform, with a deploy, and their experience frontline service. Flesh illnesses still serve their exclusive sovereignty over the domain of more knowledge, but perhaps these possessive claims aren't being quite as much obvious as they were decades ago. So I would hesitate then to claim that the study of war has been thoroughly demobilized or civilianized. There are certainly more people on what I just backwards now write about war from a greater variety of discipline and perspectives, using wide array of methodological tools, less indebted to official archives, and the power knowledge regions that contour them than when I was a student. And some of those who serve conflict have undertaken various terms towards culture, towards histories and embodiment, senses and emotions, towards gender and sexuality. So I wanted this next phase, this is the midsection of my 10 minutes, where I've got opening comments to just sort of tease out what I regard as perhaps the mean of the largest, most significant, or at least to my way of thinking, most significant shifts in the field over the last few decades. So first of all, I like to think that we, and there I am, is a presumptuous, royal, first person plural. We never undertake the masculinity of those traps and maps that are granted, but recognize how gender is a category, as well as women as historical actors in an act of uniform, figuring the topography of war. And I also think that there's been much greater praise, especially in our 10-15 years, paid to the centrality of sex and sexuality to the business of soldiering. Secondary, I think, was certainly more focused on conflict, as intimate and lived experience, with war understood to desabilize the boundaries between civilian and soldier, public and private, home and front, even while many, many interested parties, both civilian and military, embellish easy to rarefire those boundaries. And to me, these are really intriguing questions about the instrumentalization of emotion, but also the resistance of emotion, feeling, sentimentality, to be disciplined, and those are the sorts of questions that I pursue in my new book, My Dear John Adams. Thirdly, I can say that the temporal parameters of following interest in war have become significantly more emanated. So the first time preoccupation with establishing wars, causes or origins, and of course in generalizing rather, one through here, has given way to greater emphasis on what was aftermath. And I say that specifically in rural, complex, entangled aftermaths. And also to larger processes of naturalization, in other words, have projections of armed power, preparedness for conflict, insinuating themselves into everyday life, as military stuff, personnel, and values pervade physical and mental space, in ways that are simultaneously unpunishable, yet also invisible. And this, I think, has gone along in tandem with a huge upsurge of interest in US empire over the last 20 years of forever. So something else about my bio lifted, I'm sure, from something I've written, which perhaps didn't quite capture over the course of the last 30 years, I reinvented myself as an American. So I spent 15 years before I came back to being people, years ago, working in the States, and much more of my recent work has been on the US. So this was a sort of shift that I lived as a sort of green card holder in the States, as well as a scholar and teacher there. So to me, a lot of what I consider to be the richest and most interesting recent scholarship asks what happens after formal hostilities cease, if the immediate basis of what kinds of post that open term post war, both marks and conceals. So I would just draw collective attention to how much more suddenly the last decade scholarship between that post war patient, with a particular focus, I think, within that body of work on refugees and displaced persons. And I don't think it's hard to fathom why there might be so much more attention on questions of mobility, uprootedness, new rooting, and also in camping, and the sort of interplay between mobility and immobilization that we find in these study refugees, and attempts to move people that occur often in and also very profusely after. Similarly, work on veterans, I would say, occupies much more prominent space in military studies, veterans as political actors, as psychologized subjects, as agents of narrativity, tellers of stories, and key participants in war's public memorialization and memorization. And of course, that's been another huge area of growth. And all of this has gone on, again, in tandem with the rise of oral history, has been incredible proliferation of veterans history projects. And this is something that is just incredibly dense in the United States, but I don't think this is particularly U.S. But it's really intriguing, I need to think about various vectors that have helped fuel the sort of busy work around gathering war histories apart, I think, because of the approaching extinction of the greatest generation also, there's been a lot that one might say about Vietnam veterans' rehabilitation via therapeutization and so on. Now shifting towards the sort of final part of my remarks, I would like to be able to announce the combat, how wars afford, how battles of war lost, has been decented as the cardinal object of investigation by scholars of conflict. Many of them would not consider themselves to be military historians. But I think that statement, that sort of decentry of combat holds, would only up to a point in one of the homework exercises. I set myself in preparation for the parallels and said, I'd love to improve work. I was to look at the table of contents of the journal of military history over the last decade or so, which revealed a lot of military history, that's fixated on the operational and strategic levels. And that the wars in place could remain confined to the rather complicated repertoire of conflicts that we keep studying, which variously might be termed big wars, hot wars, hour wars. So in the final part of my remarks, I want to turn to the sort of portion of this problem that Mark himself worked up as he wrapped up his introductions. He asked us also to think about how we might make the study of war more globalized. And this seems to me an especially difficult and huge question, because to my way of thinking is fundamentally about the larger power structures and inequalities in academia and also in the world at large. It's not just about what we as individual scholars might personally prefer to focus on. So while students of war and public historians here in elsewhere in Europe and America have certainly become more attentive in the 21st century to the contributions, quote unquote, of people of color to the two world wars, this development should not, practically not, to me be equating with more studies having become more globalized, whatever that might mean. I think that move, while it can be very welcome, can also be touristic, can be congratulatory in ways that minimize or sometimes completely erase experiences of racism that were integral to the lived experience of serving in a segregated military, whether in the US or in the UK. So do you want thing that marks the implication of globalism might mean is that we, i.e. scholars occupying their books in the global north, pay more attention to wars in which our troops were the protagonists, whilst also acknowledging the local and lingering consequences of our military hardware, expertise and funding as they were exported to the global south. The difficulties of disposing of a more residing military dissent was this, and the problems of reckoning that you can watch would be ruinous after lives and slow deaths of conflict. So the other part of the work, Simon, I gave myself as I was thinking about them, not just the panel, but about war studies, 60th birthday, was to think about this year, what was going on in the world in 1961. So let me just remind all of us, 60 years ago, JFK authorised the dispatch of 500 more special forces to Vietnam, so supplementing the military advisors, so called, who were being denied ever increasing number. This was also the energy sent human ever-being opportunities to the Bay of Plains. We know about that. Meanwhile, the Algerian war was entering its final phase. The Potanical Crisis was unfolding in the condom. There was a revolt in Somalia, a slain or Indian war, a do-far rebellion. Civil war broke out in Guatemala, while Eritrea and Angola embarked on the war's independence. The Nicaraguan Revolution got underway, as did the first Nicaraguan Kurdish war, or within the first year of war studies existence. And I would suggest that this was not an exceptional year, by any means. This was a sort of business as long year in the long extended half the month of World War II. Those goes on, but time is finite. So I think it speaks perhaps, and I'm chasing the superpoint at which I might end, where we want to have very few of those conflicts we devote time to studying, even one acknowledging that things are neither as myopic nor as misogynistic in our highly un-earned field as they were just a few decades ago. Thank you very much. It was really rich and fascinating comments, Susan. I think we'll move to Tarak now. Just before we do, I've got some feedback from the Zoom audience. Apparently there's a really bad echo. I've put on the echo cancelling, but hopefully it'll get a little better depending on the proximity of it away. Unfortunately, well, Susan's the furthest away, so the echo is bad there, so I'm not sure if it'll be better close up. I'll monitor the Zoom feed, but Tarak, if it's getting worse somehow since you're closer, I might interrupt it. Okay, reposition, but please go ahead. Thank you, Mark. I'm afraid I'm not going to help with the de-centering battle today, but I'm going to put it in a different context. So my title is on battle and the production of military history. I've gone more with a research and progress kind of talk as opposed to a direct answer to Mark's questions. And some of this borrows from an article or a paper that we're going to submit, that I'm doing with Shane Brighton called Battle and Battles in Society and History, which we're going to put into comparative studies in society and history. Okay, so on battle and the production of military history, I want to say something about a key category of military history, battle and combat, and about the relationship between this category and military history. What can be said about the relations between fighting and military historiography? I'm using battle in a broad sense to encompass both major engagements confined in time and place, and that kind of fighting we refer to as combat. I'm going to talk about a specific battle, an engagement at Yechon in South Korea in late July 1950, memorialized at the time in the US press as the first city liberated by US and UN forces from the KPA, the North Korean army, which had invaded South Korea in June 1950. Just a presage where I'm going a little, this battle, a day long engagement was disappeared in the US Army's official history written by Roy Appelman in 1961, who commented in his text that it seemed no fighting had occurred at all at Yechon. His account became the standard reference for subsequent histories until the 1980s. Now let me set the stage for Yechon's significance with some remarks on the debate over military history. If we look at review essays and commentary on the state of military history in and outside of universities, we encounter a number of binaries around which various writers make their case and take their stand. Traditional versus new military history, war and society scholarship versus drums and trumpets history, university versus popular and staff college history, warfront versus homefront histories. Broadly, military history as battle history or as social history. I want to look at two themes that emerge from these binaries. First, the privileging of guild or university history over history done outside the academy over amateur public or practitioner history. Good, serious history is done in universities. Bad, substandard history is done outside it. I'm caricaturing, of course, and views like this reflect a standard line of university trained guild historians in general that public and amateur history is interest group history, bias, political, lacking in rigor, advocating for something and so on. Second theme in the military history debates. On the one hand, there is an articulation of hard signifiers of reality, real combat outcomes, hard facts to the battlefield or warfront, often in the literal form of the body count. And on the other hand, of soft signifiers to society or homefront, memory, myth, memorialization, the society side of the war and society couple. Broadly, reality is for what happens at the warfront while mere social construction is what happens back home. It's as if either battle and fighting are real events, which must be explained and accounted for by proper military history, or they are cultural materials to be interpreted, decoded, and critiqued as for cultural and memory studies, the myth of the blitz as opposed to the actual campaign. Now, what I want to suggest to you in my talk, and of course I can do no more than that in my 10 minutes, is that you cannot make sense of battle with this kind of setup, nor can you understand battle's relationship with battle history, with how we come to know and to make battle through writing of histories about it. Battle and combat can only be made, known, and have effects through interpretive constructs. Armed forces are invested with meaning. Their deaths, their doings in battle, their fates do not leave this meaning untouched. The relations between battle and interpretation, including historical interpretation, are constitutive before, during, and after the fighting. As Eric Wolff notes in a similar context, inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Battle, like all other social practices, is constituted in and through interpretation, through social imaginaries and constructions that shape and later make sense of armed encounters with an other. Now what are the implications of this for thinking about battle history, for authoritative researched accounts of battle? This question raises a prior one. What kind of history is traditional, so-called traditional military history? This is an extremely consequential genre, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, which shapes the identities and mentalities of peoples, polities, and their armed forces, in and beyond the contemporary west. How is this history produced? What are its research questions and archives? What are its effects? Two observations to start here. Traditional military history centers on fighting, on battle. That is its primary object, the climax of its narratives. It is a battle historiography. Second, this is the point which anyone who is familiar with this literature will recognize the minutes it said. Veterans and soldiers play major roles in its production, as sources, readers, researchers, historians, as community of interpretation. This is a practitioner and largely amateur tradition of historiography going back to European antiquity. Battle produces its own historians who make their war speak to other wars and battles. In doing so, they make sense of their experience and they add to the stock of resources for making sense of battle. There are co-constitutive relations between battle and battle historiography. Battle is, in part, reproduced through history writing about battle. That's a claim I can't cash out today, but I'll make it for purposes of good discussion. Now, back to Yachong, the battle outside of historiography between 1950 and the 1980s. I've not given you a key piece of information. The battalion combat team that took the city, 324, was from the last Black Regular Infantry Regiment in the Jim Crow U.S. Army, the 24th, officered mostly by Southern whites of low caliber who held their own troops in contempt. The key action in this battle occurred when an African-American engineer company commander, Charles Busey, observed several hundred KPA outflanking the 324, lightly wounded under mortar fire. He had two machine guns set up and then directed a withering fire on the advancing North Koreans, which stopped them in their tracks. They later counted 258 enemy dead in front of Busey's guns. The division commander gave Busey an immediate Silver Star and started paperwork for a Medal of Honor that died somewhere in the chain above. Yachong at the time had a brief moment in the mainstream white press because an AP reporter had accompanied the 324, but mostly the 24th Infantry Regiment was ignored in the mainstream white press, except for a prominent magazine story and time on why the regiment was such a bad regiment compared to other U.S. Army regiments in Korea. But in the African-American press, in the dailies from big cities that serve as national newspapers, Yachong lived in the 24th and its Black regulars were both a source of pride and a source of worry, as Black reporters covered the U.S. Army's racism, the experiences of the African-American soldiers, and later investigations by the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall of the Army's treatment of Black soldiers and officers. This coverage continued in later decades, and in JET and Ebony, these are national monthly African-American magazines, you'll always see Yachong listed as something that happened on that day in history kind of thing. Now, one of the primary motivations for veterans who research and write battle histories, for those veterans who produce materials that people like us up here make use of, memoirs, oral histories, making private papers available, interviews, correspondence, networks of veterans that you tap in, one of the primary motivations for these characters is grievance, as well as shock, loss, and anger at what happened in their war. In the 24th Infantry Regiment, we're a core of Black professional officers like Busey, who himself had been a Tuskegee Airmen, he flew P-51s with a 332nd fighter group in World War II. Many of these officers, such as Bradley Bates, had been nurtured after 1945 by any White paratroop officers who had fought with Black soldiers fed into their units in France, when the US was running out of trained infantry replacements in the fall of 1944. Now, you can imagine the anger of these African-American professional soldiers, when their victory was written out of not only the White press, but their own Army's official history. They began to agitate to correct the history, to rewrite it, to get proper recognition for their unit, and Busey's acts of heroism. In doing so, they began to produce texts and other materials of use to historians, like Busey's memoir History of Gechang, which is in my backpack. One of the key organizers of this campaign was a young Black lieutenant, David Carlaw, who was wounded in the fall of 1950 and fighting in North Korea and abandoned behind enemy lines with a group of wounded soldiers. When one of their number made it back to friendly lines, it was Busey who believed the story, organized a rescue party, and retreated to Carlaw in this group. What I'm trying to get across here is the intimate connection between war experience and the motivation for veterans' involvement in history writing. One of the principal weapons of Carlaw and Bates were other historians. They went out of their way to speak to Clay Blair, John Toland, and others were searching and writing military histories on the Korean War. It's Clay Blair, not a university historian who finally corrected the record on Gechang in his book, The Forgotten War, published in 1987. Carlaw and Bates also went after the U.S. Army Center for Military History, and in the 1980s they convinced Ronald Reagan, Secretary of the Army, to order a new study of the 24th Infantry Regiment to be researched and written by professional historians. This resulted in the detailed study Black Soldier and White Army, published in 1996, which concluded that the 24th Infantry Regiment suffered from similar problems as other U.S. Army regiments in the Korean War. They were all bad early on, but was additionally burdened by Jim Crow. Now let me make two more comments about the 24th and its Black officers and the production of military history before I conclude. First, the affair illustrates what David William Cone calls the laminate quality of the field of historical production. The materials historians use to tell us what happened in the past are produced in ways that are layered, facts silenced at the time may come to light years later, or vice versa, and many of the sites at which these facts come to light may be those presided over by journalists, amateur or local historians and societies, veterans associations and so on. There is not an event at time one, which is then historically narrated later at time two, but a complex overlapping process of silencing and recovery of facts of interpretation and reinterpretation over time. The upshot is that battle is not a stable historiographical object, historical object, but an historiographical one whose nature, character and significance is continually reassessed in light of new facts, interpretations and context. Second point, if you look at the materials produced by Lucy, Biggs, Carlisle and other African-American officers, you see something very interesting, a kind of African-American percept professional soldier version of double consciousness. Briefly double consciousness is WED Du Bois concept used to capture the way in which African-Americans were put in the position of seeing themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. It captures the subjectivity of racially subordinate people who are both inside and outside modern society, included and excluded. So on the one hand, these guys are quite evidently serious soldiers, experienced professionals, who assess the pluses and minuses of their units and their actions with detachment, who narrate painful and humorous stories much like other professional soldiers reflecting on the events of their careers. At the same time, they are African-Americans with a keen eye for racism and unequal treatment. They discuss at length the different types of racist white officer that the producing historical material is, right? The Southerners of course, but also the Yankees trying to fit in with their fellow white officers. They are well aware that the 24th infantry regiment was no crack unit, and that Yechong was a minor engagement, but equally aware that historians have picked up other ordinary white units and their minor engagements. Now, lest there be any misunderstanding, I'm not here doing African-American military history, but in post-colonial fashion I'm using subaltern histories to illuminate features of military history in general and its production. These are hardly the first officers trying to get their units story told properly. Xenophon was also aggrieved and interested in correcting the record when he sat down to write his history of the Persian expedition. Okay, conclusion. In sum, battles appear not as events with definite outcomes, foundational experiences for historical truths and political realities, but as acts of force. What they force but do not determine is reimagination, for example, about the fighting qualities of African-Americans. The events of battle require accounting and impel narration across genres. They tend to disorganize and destabilize meaning inciting interpretive labor. At the time they occur and in the years that follow, battles hem in and disrupt imaginaries, impelling new constructions about the realities of fighting and the implications of engagements. Fighting forces sense-making as events battle shape their futures and their pasts, but not necessarily in any straightforward or consistent way. Thank you very much for that provocative and fascinating talk. I'm told the sound has improved a little bit, so I wonder whether it's an issue of proximity. So Kim, can you give us your comments or close by so the time should be good? I'm thinking maybe when we have our discussion after, we might move both the tables closer to here and that way we could perhaps centralize the camera a bit better so that Matthew and Susan can do that. But Kim, take it away for now. Thank you and thanks for provoking contributions. I'm not a military historian, but I'm not going to talk about that. As I think some might expect. I'm going to frame my contributions in terms of what I would like to see more of in terms of looking ahead and what future study of warfare and violence might look like. I'll use a concrete example, much as Tara did, which is the colonial warfare within the Western Empire during the three decades prior to the First World War, just framing device as that happens to be what I'm working on right now. One of, I think, an obvious thing, a still striking thing, which both Susan and Tara have touched on, is the fact that transnational and global turn has yet to make a full impact on either military history conventionally defined or even more broadly. On one hand, you could say that's inevitable, since you have to start writing about all the talk about armies that represent particular national institutions. But there is still a really strong tendency to write nation-centric military history. It obviously doesn't apply to all areas. I think, for instance, if you look at the post-1945 conflicts of deconitiation, there's an extensive and rather critical scholarship about the circulation of expertise and knowledge, the development of counterinsurgency doctrine as a transnational process. But for other periods, that's not the case at all. The three decades preceding the First World War, I find it extremely striking that we still have these discrete national histories of national ways of war. I think the very idea of a way of war is deeply entrenched, partly because military history and study of conflicts comes out of military education. But as far as I'm aware, there is not a single comparative study of British colonial warfare as article or as book covering the period 1885 to 1914, which is really quite remarkable if you think about it. I should say I've just supervised a PhD who does just that to make us work. It's brilliant. We're in 2021 and people will still write in this, I really think it's a rather parochial way. It does not only apply, of course, to military history. There are lots of areas where people are quite content. We can look at scans at American studies, which you don't need anything beyond America to understand the world. Interestingly, if we want to talk about ways of war, which I think is perfectly appropriate, that can only be established through comparison. And yet the comparison is implicit to the assertion of exceptionalism, which is not actually carried through in the research. So we have studies of colonial countenance urgency, British traditions, French traditions. The one exception is, interestingly, that of German historiography. In some ways, I should say that German historiography in this sense is more advanced, but the Germans have always had to look very critically at military deployment and have been really quite good at carrying out these comparisons and writing critical history because you've never been able to, well, some have, of course, tried to argue that the Wehrmacht was not the back guys. But by and large, since we recognize the first genocide of the 20th century was the German suppression of the Heurea-Rock Rising in southwest Africa, that level of scholarship and the criticism or the critical approach has always been prominent there. So we do have studies of German and French colonial practices during the Boxer rebellion, for instance, comparing American violence of the Philippines with that of German in Africa, but it certainly does not exist for the British case. So that's just, I could say, an observation really, rather than anything else. Now comparisons are good. What's even more interesting is connections and entanglement because, and I think it's one of the things that Peter Wilson's work speaks to for a different era entirely, the reliance on mercenaries and non-state actors in national, supposedly, national warfare. So actually the circulation of technology, military expertise to think something like the suppression of the Mexican uprising, Cesar Rhodes' venture, there are lots of Americans there, Australians because of the mining industry, the conflict of the massacre that Hamar alluded to that I'm writing about right now. There is a British mercenaries, a French military observer, and there's of course a lot of Americans during this period were not born in America itself. So there are many ways in which we can actually problematize the idea of particular nation-bound ways of war, if we look at warfare. Susan has already sort of referred to, you know, how might we globalize study of conflict and warfare, and that indeed is what Mark asked us to do. But I think that that's simply just part of challenging the nation-centric framework. It really shouldn't be considered best practice to write about colonial wars, where you only cite the one party, which is what we still do. Now there is obviously an issue about the available sources and the language, you know, the barrier is often cited, but I think it has become a rather lame excuse really. There is often an over-reliance of outdated accounts from one side only. So I think, you know, we can talk about decolonization as an approach. We need not even agree that it's the most helpful term, but military history ought to decolonize or at least have that debate. A second thing I would say pertains to chronology and periodization, which is not, again, not just something you can say about military history or studies. We had deeply, deeply invested or take for granted chronologies that, you know, beaten into us from childhood, really. I just mentioned the post-1945 wars of decolonization. I can't think of a single study of post-1945 decolonization, French, British or any of the other ones, which actually looks backwards. They might consider the interwar period. If you look at something like Martin Thomas' work on colonial violence, and I love Martin dearly and respect his work, he wouldn't venture further back in 1918. So in many ways, we do have sort of conceptual shodders or blinkers on, which really prevents us from drawing the links and tracing continuities between the 19th and the 20th centuries, which is unhelpful. If we just think about it, at the outbreak of the First World War, colonial warfare was the single biggest military experience for almost every single army involved, and yet it's not actually something that is considered as part of the history of the First World War. It has been done for Germany. Israel Hall's work very clearly tries to trace the brutality of colonial warfare through to the First World War, but it's not something that we do, because we simply do not consider the history of the First World War as being in any way related to colonial warfare, which is, I think, sort of an obvious conceptual blind spot right there. Of course, we have Will the, I'm thinking of my former supervisor, Chris Bailey's work. He's in his post human slave published global history of the 20th century. He talked about the wars of fragmentation and breaking down these conventional barriers. And Richard O'Reilly's latest book, Blood and Ruin, The Great Imperial War, indeed breaks down the conventional framework within which we perceive the Second World War. And that's chronology, I think, is a really important area that we really need to move beyond what might be considered our comfort zone in this sense. We should also remember that the periodization with which we work is explicitly Eurocentric one and does not necessarily apply to all theaters or all conflicts globally. The final point I'll make, and it has to some extent already been made by both Susan and Tara, is, we might say, provincializing the military in conceptual terms. There are at times still a tendency to write the history of warfare and military history from within and often an identification with armies or military institutions, which you see particular in the terminology and kind of questions that are asked. I'm thinking about basic concepts such as military necessity is a historical construct that needs to be critically interrogated rather than deployed as an analytically meaningful concept. Military practice, how we explain what goes on on the battlefield, the battlefield broadly conceived, also needs to be situated as Susan alluded to in everyday life. So in it, you can even sort of return the focus even on the battlefield, and I think you spoke to the same issues. We can't make sense of the kind of violence, kind of decisions, the justification just by referring to doctrine, tactics, resources, and military objectives. And particularly if you talk about a colonial context, it goes without saying that white colonial military personnel have a racialized worldview at the most basic level. If you are used to being able to beat non-white servants, if you see everyday violence going on around you as plantations or whatever the context are going to treat non-white enemies in rather particular ways, once you answer conflict. And again, I think if we think about colonial warfare within the Western empires, the distinction between war and peace, the distinction between the Jalanti action, policing, and military action also becomes incredibly blurred, which may sound like I'm saying we need to cover everything at the same time. It's not. It's as much about the kind of questions that we ask and the approach we take. In other words, what is it that we're trying to achieve that really applies regardless of the label we use to describe ourselves and our research? And I'll stop there. Actually, yeah, could you do that? We'll have Matthew speak last, and then we'll rehearse the tape, I'll try to cram around the speakers. It seems to be hearing better that way. But Matthew, last but not least, please take us away. Thanks, Mark. Now, thank you very much for having me. It's a great panel. I'm the least qualified out of the start that way. But how do you finish a panel where everyone has already said it pretty much? It puts me in a very difficult spot, doesn't it? You've all pretty much said everything that I might have said. You've eaten my sandwiches. And I suppose it left me with the idea that I wanted to be suitably provocative and suggest, and this is the title of my paper, that actually the title of my paper is on the end of the history of war. And like Tarak, I think I'm probably interested in something loosely described as an epistemology of war. But unlike Tarak, I try to situate what I'm doing in a future scenario in terms of what it might be to try and write a history of war in the future. And the central thesis I suppose I want to put to you during the next 10 minutes is the idea that the history of war as a field of study is being replaced by those studying memory and war. And I think we need to think about this because war as representation is now being seen through the prism of a contemporary media ecology that has fractured our sense of shared reality. I think this fragmentation is here to stay. And I think it significantly complicates if not compromises our capacity to write future histories of war. These complications are the result of processes of digitisation. And this has already changed the relationship between the historian and the archon. So my paper really is about trying to try and understand the methodological challenges that this presents. And accordingly it's sort of presented, I break it down into three parts, if you like. In the first, I explain what I call the new media ecology that frames the context in which we are going to be working over the next 20 or 30 or over the future period. In a second I want to discuss the historian and their change relationship to the archive and to explore what this might mean in terms of historical method, indeed in terms of how the academy is structured and how history as a field needs to change. And I would put it to you has failed to do so, so far. And in the final section I will discuss the notion of memory wars, with a view to asking whether these churning narratives muddy the historian's capacity to develop a history of war, a meaningful history of war. Or whether in fact they might not find themselves, historians might not find themselves stuck with telling a history of the memory. So first part then on the context on the fragmented media ecology. What is it to write a history of war in a deeply fragmented media ecosystem? In the 20th and only 21st century people had a shared experience with the media. There was one term in the society it was easy to understand the political orientation of different newspapers. Now of course we have two or three screens on the go at the same time. I watched the tele and if you follow me on Twitter you know that I'm probably tweeting from my phone. My partner is watching a different tele program on their iPad while scanning the newspapers on their phone. And the result is mainstream media has become but one way of finding out what is going on in the world. And on top of this of course people now participate in the production and consumption of news in a way that was impossible before the emergence of the smartphone. This has turned the relationship between producers and the audience for news on its head. What people are recording and experiencing has produced a multitude of perspectives on war that end up on a variety of social media platforms on YouTube and elsewhere. And the result is of course a lot of noise. Who knows what the reality of a particular situation is. We can see the representations will have political effects but tracing those effects isn't easy. There is an uneven distribution of information infrastructures. Some people have access to technologies that can help them reproduce their experiences and of a particular moment and others don't. And what's the relationship between those who are online and those who are offline. Now I set up all of this because I want to think about how historians have traditionally sought to cut through these methodological challenges. Of course in many ways all of us here have sought to cut through the perception reality gap by going back to some foundational contemporaneously written document or something like that. This is the foundation stone as it were for what it is that helps us write something with authority in some way or show form. These things find their ways into archives like the National Archives. They might be a collection of diaries or letters. They are as Tarak said found in incidental archives held by people in their homes and get rediscovered and reshaped how we might interpret battle at some point in the future. But of course these archives are selective and they reinforce particular narratives. The Handslope Archive is something that immediately springs to mind as something that has framed the way we might think of country service. The archive contains about a million documents all taken from colonial offices on the withdrawal of empire. And inevitably this is material that successive British governments have not wanted to share with the public. They are being slowly released but it only became known about in 2013 following a law a case brought to the courts by Kenyans against the British government for atrocities committed by the British Army during the Mao Mao Incense. And of course in today's terms there are analogous sources of online archives. Twitter, YouTube provide new insights but they depend on information infrastructure owned by private companies rather than the state. So for example when they speak with the Australian government Facebook could turn off access to mainstream news content that gets reproduced on its platform and in the process wipe everyone's comments, thoughts, observations and other bits and pieces that might be associated with that particular news article or whatever. And so you might think you own the content but of course you don't. And likewise the British government can delete its Afghan, its British British in Afghanistan Twitter handle and suddenly that whole history of interactions online have just been erased. Now it is possible to get back at that material but it requires some people with some specific sets of skills. And at the same time the challenge of gathering up the archive within governments has become in my I would put it to you more difficult. This is a function of their repeated change in the organisation structure of governments. These are responses to cost savings and various other bits and pieces that the result is that their IT infrastructures are complex. They're slower and older than might be found in the hands of the likes of us where we're able to use smartphones and whatever to gain access to material online. And all of that of course leads to situations where we've got data decay and ultimately to data loss. We think that material is digitally secure but it isn't. And that's backed up by research as well. A data scientist at Imperial College is a survey of data loss and found that 80% of respondents said they've lost records of data in the workplace, 71% of that related to digital material. So on the one hand the methodological challenge remains as it was. Archives don't contain everything. They are selective. The documents are lost and destroyed. And the people who've written those documents, you lose them, you can't find them, they don't make it into the archive. When someone retires they literally walk out the door of that organization taking their institutional memory with them. And the result of that is that what we're seeing is a mismatch between what happens inside the government bureaucracy and what happens outside the government bureaucracy and that presents a number of methodological challenges for historians at war. It is easier to tap into older sources of material where established archiving routines are settled. But that has fundamentally changed over the last 20 years. The process of maintaining records within government has been in a process of decline primarily as a result of digitization. Similarly digitization has made it easier to build accidental archives of informally gathered source material that might be useful for research purposes. But this stuff needs to be maintained and that brings us back to the challenges around data loss and data decay. And this points, all of this I think points to some of the challenges that future historians of war and violence are going to face. You know, making use of textual analysis software to help identify keywords in large volumes of documentation, large volumes of data is now familiar to professional people like lawyers. Equally the private sector and some academics already scraped social media its insights. And these are going to be skills that historians need to master. There's no way I think that we can escape that. More than this documents contain all sorts of metadata that might be useful to build forensic analyses of the movement of people or communities. Historical GIS data can be mapped, correlations drawn and new insights generated. And some of this means that historians have to work out as part of interdisciplinary teams. This brings with it different theoretical and methodological outputs. And that implies historians will need to evolve their practices if they're going to find ways to cut through the perception reality gaps that the new media ecology is now creating. And of course the field isn't currently structured to reward these kinds of interdisciplinary activities. And that poses the question, is the field prepared for this future? Are we training people to work in ways that reflect these issues? And in my opinion I don't think we are. And of course I suppose this is the third part in my talk. This is all happening in a changed media landscape. One that is already being shaped by what we might label the memory war or the political dispute over the interpretation or memorialization of a historical event. It is easy to see how, see these memories. They're an ongoing feature of the work we do as historians. They are all over online media environments. I recently reviewed two books for the General Strategic Studies, one by Ben Barry and one on Synaikam, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both books are very interesting. I'd certainly suggest reading them preferably alongside each other. But they set out differing interpretations of why these wars unfolded in the way that they did. Both books make extensive use of interviews and the material that has been released as part of the Chilcot Inquiry. At the same time, however, neither author could make use of the mild archives. Put simply, those archives have not been released. And probably they won't be for a fair bit of time yet. So inevitably these books will form parts of a memory war that tells us something about how these wars are understood in the decade since their end. But they can't apply the kinds of methods that historians would use to develop their analysis of events in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I want to suggest that he's going to get hard of historians to develop their analysis in an ongoing, fragmented or even authoritarian media context. This is especially the case as new media environment panders to a polarizing politics. Social media is designed to help people with like-minded views gathered together, irrespective of the event of their nationality. It's designed to displace the expert from discussions in favor of a multiplicity of voices. And political activists are already exploiting these features of social media as a way to shape the future memory wars to come. In my opinion, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already fashioned a form of memory war that has shaped politics this past 10 years and might even help to explain the attacks on the capital building in January this year or the former BBC studios in Shepard's Bush early in the summer. Both attacks included veterans. Conspiracy theory was the norm in the discourse among those involved in the attacks. The former members of the parachute regiment involved in the attacks in the BBC building felt betrayed by British politics, found themselves alienated from official narratives and turned towards anti-vaccine as a way to express how politics needed to re-engage with its citizens. By contrast, the conspirators and the attacks on the capital building in January this year wore t-shirts telling everyone that they were going to be there. The t-shirt was a memento of the event. It was like going to a music gig. They had the t-shirt and were taking photos of themselves proving that they were present. Yes, of course, from a traditional security studies perspective, this gave information to the FBI who could use it to arrest those who participated on the attack on the capital. But these images have become part of a contested memory already, where the photos in the moment are remembered in a particular way in an effort to construct a politics that reflects a future political agenda. This was about securing Trump's political base, providing a platform to keep the culture wars going, ensure that people would not forget the moment. And this, of course, mirrors the efforts of organizations like the Islamic State. Islamic State may now be stateless, but their media strategy aimed at shaping future opinion and to maintain the idea of the Islamic State beyond its physical incarnation. So to conclude, how might we write a history of warfare in the future? What does it mean to write a history of war in a fragmented media ecology where digitization has complicated the historical method and memory wars are already shaping how people will interpret academic work? I would argue that changing the changing relationship between historians and the archive will further detach historians from how they currently understand and undertake their work. And the political context in which historians hope to show the difference between perception and reality has changed in favor of those who have already shaped the memory wars that have yet to come. In this context, although we may need a methodologically sound history of war, what we'll actually find ourselves with are histories of the memories of war, not a history of the realities of history. So I think we're going to open up now to a more general sort of discussion and hopefully pick up on some of the really interesting threads that have been brought up. Before we do that, I'd just like us to reconfigure the tables a bit. So do you guys mind if we all sort of scrunch together? Okay, we're back off of mute. So just listening to all four of you speak, I was struck by the huge breadth of topics, ideas, approaches, experiences, and expertise that was covered. And, you know, I sort of consciously assembled this panel and the idea too that, you know, you're not all historians, first of all, and you're not all scholars who would end up myself as military historians. Because I think, you know, a lot of the ideas and the big challenges that were thrown out this evening were sort of about, you know, what is military history or the history of war? How do we define this? And I'm thinking because I never knew my power personally, but I've been reading a lot of his work lately, and I'm pulled by friends and colleagues that he himself never referred to himself as a military historian. He always preferred the terminology a historian of war, because it was less limiting in a way. You know, he always talked about bigger, broader questions and beyond just the battlefield and operational military history, society, politics. And, you know, that's what all of you have done this evening, you know, sources, approaches, theories. So I'm wondering, I mean, if we want to perhaps use a more Catholic expansive term to refer to what we're all interested in here this evening, as the history of war, is that a useful term for thinking about this? Are we in danger? Possibly if we open up this field so widely about going into sort of disciplinary chaos, if everything sort of starts being thrown in? Or is that actually a strength, you know, looking more for connections and intersections between different fields of of historical inquiry or even other disciplinary undertakings? And I just, this remind me of sort of this dilemma that we seem to have in the war studies department here at King's, which I am, I'm still very new to and finding my feet. But, you know, as my colleagues have constantly reminded me, there's no discipline of war studies. And everyone here in this department does different things. I'm a historian. There are many IR specialists. We have political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, all working, you know, on this sort of very expansive concept of war conflict or the military. But I think, you know, in a sense, that is sort of the strength and the richness of this department. So you have just so many different people sort of going at a large issue, the history of war, problem of war in society, from all these different angles. And I mean, is this, is this the way we should always be writing this? We, you know, is the goal ultimately to, to sort of revolutionize the way we conceptualize this more generally. So I'm badly an angel here at King's, but I'm just curious to hear what our esteemed panelists think about this. And if they would also like to, you know, pick up on threads brought up by one another, please go ahead. And after we've heard from you, again, we might take some questions from the audience, both online and of course in person. But anyone would like to get us started? Well, I'll make two points. You don't have to respond to what I said either time. Taking that on board. But I've got two points. So one of them is that for me, the, I wouldn't want to privilege the battlefield over all the other kinds of things that war impacts. But I think we definitely need to think about the battlefield. And there's a reason that combat and fighting are things that, you know, we should be studying. For me, the problem is the instrumentality with which these things are, with which combat is studied in traditional military history and strategic studies. And on a lot of the university stuff that is, they're interested in why you win or lose, not in all the other effects that fighting might have, as it radiates through the social cultural context in which it occurs. So for me, the kind of kind of way I think about the kind of thing that I was talking about is fighting in society, even though what I'm talking about happens on battlefields. But it's not, as it were, separate from. That's one point. So that'd be my take on beyond battlefield. Second point, I just want to pick up on what Kim was saying about this national ways of war literature. In some ways, I think the ways of war literature is a very interesting historiography, because it is trying to capture more than just a strategic doctrine, right? Or it's got popular culture. It's got the economy. It's got the social organization. It's got all these things together into how it is that a society might imagine going to war with another. So I think in some ways there's something positive about that. But what I think we use, and here I very much agree with the way that Kim was putting this point, is that battle imaginaries circulate transnational. They are not only in one country. The IRA was thinking about a tech offensive. And they were paying very close attention to this. Mao's vision of the United States is a paper tiger whose troops would run away when Chinese troops closed for close combat. And if you killed enough of them, the casualties would lead the United States to withdraw. That idea traveled from Korea in the Chinese intervention in late 1950 to in several efforts to make this happen in Vietnam. And it was on the shelf of OBL when we did him down in Abbottabad. He was reading about these things. This idea of the paper tiger is something that inspired his notion of what might happen if he achieved 911. So battle imaginaries have a transnational circulation of how you imagine fighting levels. And I think this is something that can only be studied with a kind of transnational and global history that you were invoking. I can follow up in terms of the instrumentalization of military history, which I think is one of the main reasons I don't like to think of myself as a military historian. There's certainly no problem in showing how the past is relevant to the present. I think that's what we do as historians. I do think there is a problem when we produce history with the explicit purpose of applying it in the present. And that's where I think we often see in conventional military history the kind of lessons learned, reducing the past to a sort of back you can grab your hand into and say, okay, you know, and that's also where you get sort of the good general, bad general, um, asking questions, which other academics, it's not really about academic questions, which doesn't pertain to historical methodology or theory, but refers to close bits or whatever military doctrine. And I think we simply just have to accept that, that that is, that exists. And it looks like we are, as Mars suggested, we're all approaching the same thing in different ways. But I think sometimes it's not the same thing we're talking about. If, if, I mean, it's always struck me, you know, we don't study genocide in order to get better at killing people. But some of us do study wars in order to win them better and more effectively. And that is, is I find it troubling. Others might find it some kind of elitist ivory tower exercise. And it's just sort of an intellectual pursuit when it has no bearing on, on, you know, reality and on the current affairs. But I think we really have to acknowledge the fact that the questions we ask determines what it is we are undertaking in terms of critical study. I can probably contribute. I mean, I think, you know, as a field that is clearly, I mean, fundamentally important as a way of educating civil society more broadly to speak to both of your point, you know, we can't, I mean, obviously military, the military are looking to instrumentalize what we do for their purposes. But it seems to me that as civilian historians, we've got the opportunity to sort of spin this the other way around for citizens more broadly, such that we can engage them. This is an important space for, for a variety of people to work primarily because it's a process of educating fellow citizens in what military power is about, how it works in, in precisely the ways that you just described it. And, you know, it's, it's, it's clearly, there's clearly a responsibility here to do to take this seriously and to work in such a way that helps facilitate an education for citizens. You know, there's a, there's a problem in I think that military power is clearly more complex. And certainly the more we study it, we can see its complexities, which in turn makes it harder to convey some of the nuances and the issues that might need to be put across to our students and in public. I don't think that that that's clearly, we've got to work at that as in ways that acknowledge the some of the divisions. And, you know, that's why I very much appreciated where Susan was going right at the beginning, because that just shows you how, how the field has evolved in, in ways that actually do help us engage our students in and in a way that really does make us think much more carefully about how that works, I think. And, you know, military history is situated at a very important place in national, national dialogue, as you will say, and I think, you know, that's even more a reason why, as academics, we must try to engage and take this, this thing seriously, because it's so important in framing how people might think of themselves and how they might then, you know, pursue and address some of the things that students say, you know, militarization society, where veterans' business are going to be under bits and pieces. That would be my initial thought. So, I mean, as Matt was saying, I think one of the things that Susan's talk really about, again, was the changing nature of, you know, military history and history of war. You know, it's not just a boy's club anymore. And I, yeah, well, what I was going to say is, it's still very much a work in progress, obviously. But, I mean, if you look at sort of things going on, you know, right now amongst people who are called themselves militarists, who are interested in these topics that have to give people, you know, like Max Hastings and other people who are lamenting the decline of operational military history and saying, you know, will be pushed out, basically, by all these other interests who are trying to take over, essentially, you know, is, are people who are interested in the history of war and military history? This is a question sort of one of our guests brought up, Jonathan, where he's asking, you know, is it in this confused, candlestick stage or are we now in this stage where people are sort of critically divided along political and generational lines? And, you know, there's this sort of upheaval in the way we can sexualize and approach this topic. Are we, are we hopelessly divided? Is this a good thing? I don't think I'm hopelessly divided myself. Again, it comes back to who this nebulous we is. And we are many who work in all sorts of different departments. One of the points that you made in the first round of our questions, a question in which I sat out was about whether, I think, you know, we should or should not lament the fact that war studies failed to become a hegemonic project. And yet, and one of the things that I was thinking about when I was preparing my remarks was, was to sort of think that in fact, war studies, even if there aren't many kings out there, there are far more war studies degree programs, certainly monsters. I mean, some virtually something than, I mean, I found myself thinking about the trajectory of peace studies and peace studies. I mean, back in the day, there was a very private department in Bradford, which now has been unfolded with development studies. And I think if one were to think in parallel about the fate of war studies and peace studies, one would have to think that war studies has been that peace studies hands down, even if that doesn't mean it's institutionalized in many kings like departments across the country. But to me, it seems all to the good that people who take war seriously and not because they want to do it better and offer sort of operationalizable lessons are located in all sorts of different departments. And indeed, sort of thinking about the people at kings who were studying war, I mean, someone who's work, I'm very fond of Santana Das is not, I believe, in war studies. And although you listed many sort of disciplines that are clustered together under the manner of war studies at kings, it doesn't even encompass all of the people who do incredibly rich work on war. So I do not lament the fact that we do study war, do that in all sorts of different institutional locations. We don't all share a sense that we're military historians. We often have the luxury of not having to put ourselves in particular boxes unless we happen to be applying for jobs where we are required to present ourselves as X and not Y. And so I think there's a long pluralism and I think I see more welcome diversity in the sort of broad field of the study of war and violence and I do not lament either fragmentation or the failure of kings to reproduce itself in many, many different locations. Yeah, I mean, if I can just pick up very briefly on that, I mean, one of the goals that I had in, the hopes that I had for this seminar series program is to showcase the changing approaches, the changing kinds of people that are looking at these histories. If people look at sort of the speaker list for the next events that are coming, I hope that will reflect our commitment to try and bring in more diverse approaches. And so that hopefully that will also inspire the next generation of scholars that this isn't just a voice club or it's not just a white mask club or whatever else it is, so that we can actually have people approaching this problem of war, which is obviously one that affects all of society, but from different historical approaches, discipline within history and other disciplines from without. But I'll end there. Would any of our panelists like to put up anything or should we take some questions from the audience or give the audience a chance? All right. Well, so yeah, I'll write to the Zoom people. I want to go back to this question of battle, because I think that came up in, well, maybe not all of the presentation, but many of them. And I think already kind of answered this question, in a sense, but what is at stake with the idea of kind of de-centering battle? I think Susan, you were the first to kind of mention this. And then also Matthew, you were kind of maybe a little bit oblique way to talk about this in a sense of the history of war being replaced by history of the memory of war. So I wonder if, in a sense, that's related to de-centering battle in some sense, kind of getting to the kind of social implications of it or something. And then for Kim, but the question is your mentality. Of course, we don't study genocide to do the better. We study genocide so that we can avoid doing it. So I wonder if this is a question of avoiding some tally or of just the fact that there are different value ends that we instrumentalize things for. Can I tell you a question, Sarah, that was indeed the first one to put on the table, my wishful desire that battle occupying less space in the study of war. So what I was getting at there was it really speaks to the point that we've already been talking about in which Kim wrote a few moments ago, which is about this instrumentalization of lessons of war. We study battle in order to not fight the same battle as heavily as we did in the past. And although, of course, I mean, that is not my needs, the totality of how battle is studied. Nevertheless, there are other things that it seems to me that there's a preoccupation with battle necessarily is going to obscure. So when I made that statement, I was also thinking about the way in which the great majority of people who study uniform are not frontline combat soldiers. In some cases, who gets on the front line and who doesn't, this is a piece of tyrant's paper is profoundly racialized. But if we're not thinking about the mere echelon in our histories of violence, and we're not thinking about those who are in the orbit of battle, then it seems to me that we are excluding a huge amount of experience, which to me really needs to be critically approached to study conflict in a more comprehensive way. So that's just a short answer to what was behind my point about battle and its privacy. Yeah, you're of course right that we instrumentalize history in various ways. But I think that there's a point at which we just have to recognize that that debate is difficult if that is indeed what we do. I see, for instance, in the Marine Corps, Continental Insurgency Manual, it's called FM324. They have a bibliography and they quote Brian Linsworth on the Philippine Interaction. So here's an example of a successful Continental Insurgency. Several millions of so hundreds of thousands civilians were killed. That's when you have to wonder what is it that military historians are doing. Brian Linsworth is a wonderful president at this point. But if you produce something that can be deployed and what I would say can provide some kind of veneer of justification or guidance, that's just not what I am interested in. Others might be. But I think that's when we actually have to recognize that these are not just different approaches, but distinct undertakings. And speaking about the battlefield as well, I mean, even the notion of a battlefield, if we want to understand violence, we need to situate what happens on the battlefield within a broader context of everyday violence, of sexual violence, but also in the absence of battle, the frustration of pursuing an enemy you never see, let's say what Vietnam was raised earlier, how the absence of a battle creates different dynamics of violence as well. So yeah. We have a question from David Edgerton, which I think picks up on some of those ideas we were just talking about. And he asks, this is a question related to practitioners again. And, you know, is the problem of the history of war any different in terms of practitioners and who's writing it from, say, someone writing a history of science or formal policy or politics? You know, this is a track we can't avoid in a sense. Yeah, I mean, my practitioner point is less comparative than it is specifically focused on military history, on battle historiography, what I'm calling that. And if you look at this genre, the presence of soldiers in producing it, it's simply extraordinary, right? And so I think we have to take it seriously that it is a practitioner discourse and what's involved in that. Now, what I was sort of playing to when we, you know, when we as guild historians or I'm not one, but, you know, guild historians put down people outside the academy, we have to think about, you know, where it is that some of the great advances in the historiography have come from. LGBTQ history began with activists. It was in activists of Manhattan Apartments that became archives of that movement that only later moved into the university. The history of the Revolution and Haiti, which has washed over all of the disciplines and led to many of the kinds of things that, you know, all of us sort of celebrate in the contemporary academy. That was done by C. L. R. James taking a loan from his bank, you know, in the interwar period, you know, that it wasn't guild historians who did that, you know, when Eric Williams went and did his capitalism and slavery book again into war Cambridge, that is now the main thesis that slavery was central to the rise of capitalism. He was laughed out of town is that not a serious thing. He had to go back with the prime minister. So when I say practitioners, I'm not putting them down. Right. And when you start getting inside these guys, research practices, they are very some of them are very serious characters. And one of the things I want to say that is central to soldiers history writing is counter history. They know where the skeletons are buried. They're very angry and upset. One of the standard histories of how the Chinese, quote unquote, surprised the Americans in late 1950 in North Korea with their intervention is written by a retired Marine Corps S2, you know, Italian intelligence officer, Patrick Rowe, who had a real estate career after he got out of the Marine Corps. And then when he retired from that, he sat down and said, well, I want to know why we ended up surrounded in the chosen reservoir. And he wrote, you know, he read his Bruce Cummings. He, you know, read what I think any of us regard as a sort of very serious attempt to write history. So some of these characters, I think it's for me, what's interesting and what is the nature of this historiography. Because I take it to be a very significant one and one that I think tells us a great deal about war and its effect on society if you know how to interpret it. If I may just just very briefly venture into the war studies debate, which I published, I love the idea of war on the round. I just wish it had been pursued with greater energy. Where is the English literature or the literature professors? Why is the philosophers, you know, not back on staff? Where are the anthropologists, right? I think Max Hastings is crazy in that article. There's all kinds of history of war going on in the UK Academy and the US Academy, and so on. It's just not the kind of history he maybe likes. And the last thing I'll say about this, Kimberly Phillips has a book called War, What Is It Good For? And there's an American Studies professor at GWU Thomas Guglielmo, I think I've mastered his name, who's also writing on this. One of the central things that they are arguing is that the African American military experience in World War II and the post-war War II wars was central to the nature of the civil rights movement and to race relations in the United States, right? So race relations and civil rights are not subject separate from the experience of African American soldiers at war, whether that was as combat troops or other kinds of combat troops. Now that seems to me exactly the kind of thing that we're looking to see, the history of war and of armed forces being taken seriously in areas well outside of anything to do with one's whatever battle. Do you want to lay back on this? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm just picking up on a couple of points here. I mean, there's a point in here around flesh witness, and I suppose my own view is that the military won't have and increasingly increasingly don't have exclusive claims around what it is to flesh witness. So and that is complicating how we might portray narratives of war and that then is having an effect or will certainly have an effect on how we think about future histories of war. People war in many respects, it seems to me anyway, is much more participative than it has been at any point previously, principally a function of the fact that people are recording things, they are on the battlefield, they are connected, they are putting things out online. That is already being interpreted. It's been mangled through a inaccurate historical lens to shape a particular narrative that then feeds back into how we might think about and engage with what an emerging history of that battle. In that respect, what we're talking about is a de-centering of the battlefield. I mean, where is the battlefield in this space? The battlefield is what, it's somewhere online, somewhere there's a front line. Well, where's the front line? You know, if you're in a situation where YouTube content competing YouTube videos are being pulled down, or because they may or may not reflect the particular preferences of one side or another, you know, right at the beginning when we come to thinking about how the archive is structured, it is an online right now kind of engagement that is clearly going to present challenges for us as historians at war, and which is precisely why I would put it to you that actually what we're going to find ourselves in a situation where we are only really able to sort of repeat what might be considered to be memories of war. You know, we know that there are echoes of a particular debate or discussion online. We look to try and understand how to bottom that out. We have the resort to forensic computing skills and worked into this routine in order to draw that together, and all of that inevitably means that we are kind of stuck in an echo chamber of our own making based around our methodological preferences and who we know and who we can engage as part of that team. And you know, on the one hand, there is a plurality of views that might come out of that, but my concern, I suppose, is that the deeply politicized space that we are now working in is not going to go away. You say, well, it's never gone away. But you know, it is narrowing in a way that is reframing discussion debate that is making it, I put it to you, going to be harder to sort of frame some of the pluralities of use that we might want to promote and encourage a nationalism or a particular perspective on military history that has an instrumentality at this point. So what you're saying that, yeah, Matthew, remind me that one of our zoom guests on the point that sort of the overabundance of information that we now have about war and the experiences of war and how it's being fought right now means the future historians of war are going to have to have a whole new skill set in mining data and analyzing it even the way they conceptualize approaching these topics. We know too much now compared to people working on 18th century warfare or earlier. So it seems to me like there has to be a willingness amongst people interested in histories of war to constantly be adopted and reframing new ways to approach and conceptualize what they're doing. I mean, I think we're looking at sort of analog histories of war where we're based around paper archives. There's a degree of segmented understanding about some of these things. Kim was referring to it before in terms of there's a periodization. We fall into the patterns that sometimes aren't helpful. We need to go back and think carefully and critically about those and there's a particular, we're working in a particular social context where some of those spaces are people are more willing to fund because they fit within a particular academic patronage network. And all of that then comes back to saying, well, how do we recover some of the narratives that you guys have been talking about in it? Where actually, I worry that I suppose the politics of that is going to make it increasingly challenging and we're going to be stuck in these and instead of these literature. We've got a few questions from people online, but let's take one from the physical audience and then we'll try to be one or two from the online before we wrap up. So here's your question. Yeah, thank you all very much. The names you would grant are former law enforcement, intelligence and law institutes, worked in various countries, the main World Bank and European Commission programs where certainly, should we say, great to know if we have territories here, military historian, I should say, and indeed historian, we must sort of be very committed to see what's in place. One quick question, there was a review of two books mentioned, one of them, which I just bought, what was the other one? Because the second question is, where do you see the non-angloisphere of the democratic countries? And indeed, the successor states of the Western Empire is fitting into this China-Mexico laws. Because I do believe in continental Europe, there is a widespread pacifism which pursues problems. I've seen the dark sides. So maybe I can pick up the first point. The other book is by Simon Aiken, it's called The Changing of the Guard. Oh yeah, I agree with that. Now on the weather to write off the Russians and the Chinese, Putin established a Russian military history, re-established a Russian military society in 2012. And it seems to me that that's clearly a political project, which is obviously pointing at some of the things that Kim has been discussing. And I have no doubt that there are equivalents in China and other parts of the world as well. I don't think that, you know, are we experiencing great power competition in military history? I hesitate to suggest that that's not where any of us are, I don't think. You know, is it the case that other academies in other parts of the world are going through their own political social challenges? And that is indeed framing how they construct their narratives, how military history fits into their national identity. For sure it does. I don't see what we're discussing here. I see what we're discussing here in terms of the plurality or, you know, the plurality views as a strength of the field and says something about the strength of civil society more broadly in the West to use that term. So, you know, I'm, you know, there are, and no doubt there are reasons to be cautious about how the world is working right now, but I don't think that as academics we are doing, you know, I wouldn't want to say that I'm doing anything that is contributing to that way that that is going. Well, I mean, I, you know, I'm keen to teach students to think about how much of our works so that they can make informed decisions when it comes to voting. You know, it's, for me, it is as simple as that, you know, this is a responsibility as an academic to teach these things both from the point of view of when things go wrong on how atrocities, you know, where atrocities are. And I don't think we as a society should chirp away from that. At the same time, I'm not a pacifist. And I recognize that military power has a place in the way societies work and in the turning of the international system. So, you know, in that respect, you know, ladies and me are realists, because that's kind of, you know, where I am on some of that stuff. But it's a practical responsibility, you know, it's a social responsibility for me. In response to that question, but is anyone listening judging by Wendling's zoom numbers? We are already out of time, so I'm going to try to do two more questions. We have from you and I'm going to toss out this question before I'll be asked to us. This is from Mark Turner online. He is curious about whether there's a greater willingness to address Western war crimes, or whether this remains suppressed for a variety of reasons. So these are greater willingness to talk about Western war crimes rather than non-Western war crimes in the categories themselves are obviously complex as Matthew is leading to. So that's one question to consider. And I'll be at least ask your question. Great. Thanks. I'll keep it quick. Really interesting debate about pluralism. I mean, I'm not a historian. It's kind of coming from the outside of their anxiety, but also the thing that I'm being really excited about and including different voices, conceptual tools, possibly different disciplines or methods and what it might possibly need for this kind of history. So I'm wondering, is there a kind of move towards more transdisciplinary encounters? So not just about adding and adding different things, but also I'm doing a little bit of the disciplinary boundaries of history, how you see that. And then also in terms of, if you're not thinking about pluralism and these kind of solutionist times, just bringing in all voices will solve the problem. You know, you were only two, you were talking at the beginning, but it's about as far as limiting something bigger. So really making this point that this is not about just kind of sight, you know, a con of something that happened. Maybe another question to Tara. I mentioned to you earlier, I was reading your 2011 millennium article this morning. If you were to take stock of where, you know, your kind of more studies project went, no, 10 years later, how do you assess that? Because you set it up kind of in relation to security studies, securitization theories and really kind of what your IR had on that you might have had. You might have more confidence than you do not, right? So how do you assess the transformation of this hand over time and the discipline or feel that kind of soft launch times? That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure that I was ever trying to launch anything. I think what people did launch is something called critical military studies. And I think it's become a really vibrant field that has done a lot of very interesting transdisciplinary work. I think some of its limitations is that it's incredibly Eurocentric. It's focused almost entirely on Western soldiers. And in terms of gender, it tends to be interested in the gender problem, the gender politics of Western women in the military. So I think there's, you know, this question of globalization and transnationalization is really quite a serious one. But I would want to underline what Susan said right at the beginning, which is that when you, you know, OSU just advertised for a global military historian, right? So it is interesting that Ohio State University there, you know, there is some, which is a big military history department, there is some sort of formal move in this area. But I think it's also a kind of self-congratulatory thing. You know, we've got a brown person doing, you know, this kind of stuff. So we have the one sort of, you know, job done, we can, you know, walk away and get back with focusing on our own problems. But when it comes to war, I also have a sort of sympathy with focusing on our own problems with the fact that national scholars study national militaries. You know, it's not totally shocking for one thing. Those are those are the sources available. And while I'm babbling the way out, I'll just say that I have much less problem, I think than Kim does working with military. I like to work with military. I found out all kinds of things about war and soldiers by working with military. And if I could help make that, you know, I obviously am not helping people to mend genocide, but I might be helping people do things in ways that, you know, cause less random violence to be handed out. So that feels okay as a politics. But as a scholar, I think I'd be crazy not to take every chance to get close to those that I study. And the very last one I'll say in response to the question over here, there are very interesting people working in, I don't know quite what you would call their field, gender politics. I'm thinking of Maria Stern and Maria Boz, who do very extensive work on soldiers, mostly in Africa, but not only in Africa, and go after their constructions of masculine and neither experiences of war and really open up these questions in ways, you know, with a kind of unbelievable field work in Eastern Congo and things like this. Mike McBevern is an anthropologist who does this. So are definitely trying to be character. That ain't going to go away. That's how we're going to get more important given the recent deployment of course. The deployment of Europe. So it's a more alive time. Yeah. I mean, the politics of those conflicts are another thing. But I mean, there are a very interesting scholarship going on in the non-Western world about related to war, just have to go look for it. We're almost up to any last thoughts or comments from anyone on the panel. Well, there was a question about war crimes. Yeah. Which I really have an issue when people talk about war crimes as if it's an objective thing rather than atrocity or massive or something like that. And it actually speaks to some of the things we've been talking about, which is mistaking a historical country, you know, something that's the product of a particular historical moment and deploying that as an analytical tool, which is what it is. We all know slavery was legal. It wasn't a crime. That doesn't change how we view it. And so whether or not something is considered a war crime or not should have zero bearing on how we try to make sense of it. Of course, it's part of the story and how it's commemorated or not or justified. But that's just, I mean, the Mamao case, that's low files, right? David Anderson's work, I respect, he considered this, you know, victory in many ways it was. But it wasn't a victory for history because if they had lost that claim, would that have changed our narrative of the brutality as a suppression from Mamao? No, it shouldn't. So no, it's something we need to study rather than use as an analytical framework as well. All right. I think we've asked enough of our speakers for this evening. So can we all just join in a round of applause? Thank you very much. All right. So this is going to wrap up the first seminar for the New Direction series. I hope you all will join us in a fortnight time for the next seminar, which is going to feature Dr. Claire Eldridge from the University of Leeds will be giving a talk entitled, I'm a soldier like you, race, rank, and relations in France's Amélie de Chique 1914 to 18. Dr. Eldridge will be joining us from Paris, where she's currently conducting fieldwork. So this will be an online only Zoom event, which will hopefully we do not have the problem of the hour will be echoing out there. But yeah, thank you again to our speakers. And thank you for everyone who joined us. And I'm turning the recording off now. So