This edited volume brings together a series of contributions exploring the socio-cultural and psychological representation of peace and conflict. It ventures into areas of the humanities and social sciences not typically foregrounded in Peace Studies, such psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography.

This edited volume brings together a series of contributions exploring the socio-cultural and psychological representation of peace and conflict. It ventures into areas of the humanities and social sciences not typically foregrounded in Peace Studies, such psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography.

This work explores the function of both divisive and uniting symbols in various conflict settings around the world. It takes a fairly broad perspective on what constitutes a symbol, to include objects such as flags, signs, language, and monuments, all of which convey conflicting meanings in a society affected by conflict. In addition, the authors include commemorations and other dynamic events that serve as a means for groups or individuals to connect with past generations, celebrate a heritage, and possibly express religiosity. In order to provide context for the nuances surrounding the symbols, there are brief historical overviews for each conflict featured in the volume. In each chapter, three issues are emphasized: the particular symbols that are divisive in the specific culture; how these symbols were used to perpetuate conflict; and how these symbols can be used or modified to bring unification. Contributions come from authors from around the world that have conducted empirical studies on intergroup relationships or have provided significant academic contributions in the area of symbols and collective memories represented in theoretical publications. Taken together, the contents of the volume provide a rich tapestry of intellectual analyses to the diverse selection of conflict settings from around the globe. In addition to the nine case studies, there is an introductory chapter, which grounds the discussion in current peace psychology literature as well as provides future directions. This volume is a valuable resource to many, as the focus on symbols can span many disciplines such as political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and art. Furthermore, it is of significant interest to all scholars and peace activists studying these various countries and their conflicts.

This first-of-its-kind volume brings discursive psychology and peace psychology together in a compelling practical synthesis. An array of internationally-recognised contributors examine multiple dimensions of discourse—official and casual, speech, rhetoric, and text—in creating and maintaining conflict and building mediation and reconciliation. Examples of strategies for dealing with longstanding conflicts (the Middle East), significant flashpoints (the Charlie Hebdo case), and current heated disputes (the refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe) demonstrate discursive methods in context as they bridge theory with real life. This diversity of subject matter is matched by the range of discursive approaches applied to peace psychology concepts, methods, and practice. Among the topics covered: Discursive approaches to violence against women. The American gun control debate: a discursive analysis. Constructing peace and violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Discursive psychological research on refugees. Citizenship, social injustice, and the quest for a critical social psychology of peace. The emotional and political power of images of suffering: discursive psychology and the study of visual rhetoric. Discourse, Peace, and Conflict offers expansive ideas to scholars and practitioners in peace psychology, as well as those in related areas such as social psychology, political psychology, and community psychology with an interest in issues pertaining to peace and conflict.

Recent military interventions in Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst others, have placed conflict again at the forefront of international debate. Yet the theoretical analysis of conflicts and of their social and psychological impacts has predictably lagged behind such tumultuous events. Moreover, while scholarship in the areas of strategic studies, international relations and peace studies has addressed the issues in terms of "conflict resolution" and "post-conflict reconstruction", little or no attention has been given to crucial interrelations between conflict and culture. Bringing together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, International Law, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Theory and Semiotics, Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation therefore employs an avowedly interdisciplinary approach in order to address what the editors perceive to be a significant omission. In five themed sections, this ambitious volume tackles many questions often excluded from discourses on conflict. How does a past conflict inform a community's vision for its future? How are conflicts represented in the media, in literature, in journalism, in all forms of cultural expression? How do representations of conflict compound but also confuse, and even reconfigure, cultural identities? What role do histories of conflicts play in the construction of national identities? Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation will be of direct interest to scholars and practitioners working in media and communications, international relations and international law, peace studies, human rights, cultural studies and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and gender studies, and comparative literature and literary theory.

This study thinks with photography about peace. It asks how photography can represent peace, and how such representation can contribute to peace. The book offers an original critique of the almost exclusive focus on violence in recent work on visual culture and presents a completely new research agenda within the overall framework of visual peace research. Critically engaging with both photojournalism and art photography in light of peace theories, it looks for visual representations or anticipations of peace – peace or peace as a potentiality – in the work of selected photographers including Robert Capa and Richard Mosse, thus reinterpreting photography from the Spanish Civil War to current anti-migration politics in Europe. The book argues that peace photography is episodic, culturally specific, process-oriented and considerate of both the past and the future.

Despite the vast body of texts inspired by warfare – from The Iliad to Maus – war writing is perpetually haunted by the notions of unrepresentability and inadequacy. War and Words examines the methods, conventions and pitfalls of constructing verbal accounts of military conflict in literature and the media. This multifocal study draws on a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including feminism, posthumanism, masculinity, trauma, spatiality and media studies, and brings together such diverse material as canonical literature, war veterans’ testimonies, imaginative fiction, computer games, English curricula, and Al-Qaeda’s propaganda pieces. In five consecutive sections – “Spreading War Propaganda”, “Reconstructing War Spaces”, “Envisioning War”, “Gendering War”, and “Teaching War” – the contributors consider war in its manifold aspects: as an ideological tool used for propaganda purposes, as a spatial reconstruction performed for the critical reassessment of past conflicts, as a projection (or extrapolation) of possible future conflicts and their social repercussions, as a political statement to deconstruct the oppressive nature of violence, and, finally, as a didactic tool to foster empathy. This collection will appeal primarily to academics specialising in English and American literature, but also to those researching media, gender, and game studies.