CALL FOR PAPERS

The new Research Centre for the Cultural History of War at Manchester in conjunction with the European Review of History/Revue européenne d'histoire invite proposals for an international conference on the history of state violence, the cultural responses it has evoked, and humanity’s response to cultures of violence. Our objective is a genuine historicisation of state violence that counters the tendency to treat twentieth-century practices as a prism through which to interpret organised violence in previous centuries.
We are seeking to open a series of dialogues: between established and younger scholars, between historians from North America and their counterparts in Europe, between historians of the ancient, mediaeval and modern world, and between history and other disciplines.

Confirmed Speakers: Jay Winter (Yale), Jacques Semelin (Directeur de recherches au CADIS/EHESS), Hans van Wees (UCL), Ido de Haan (Amsterdam)

We would particularly welcome papers that develop the following themes:

State violence: the practices, techniques and representations associated with genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’, forced migration, incarceration, enslavement and cultural devastation (and the significance of race, religion, ethnicity and historical precedent in these contexts). Perpetrators & Victims: the attribution of individual responsibility, criminality and guilt; the contested ascription and appropriation of ‘victim’ status and problems of powerlessness, ‘voicelessness’ and justice; and experiences of exclusion, statelessness or refugeedom engendered by state violence. Humanitarian Responses: the legitimacies of inter-state intervention, from notions of international ‘religious brotherhoods’ to universal Human Rights; the construction and representation of ‘humanitarian crises’; the theoretical and practical dilemmas associated with international policing and armed humanitarian intervention. Aftermaths: the possibilities of redress, restitution and reconstruction, either at state level (e.g. in modern times through international war crimes tribunals) or personally (e.g. through testimony, or oral or written histories); the process of historicising, memorialising, and commemorating state violence and humanitarian intervention, and the significance of these practices for both agent and subject in terms of citizenship, community or national identity.

Please submit 500 word proposals for panels or individual papers by the end of December 2003 to the addresses below. Individual papers should last 20 minutes.

Papers will be published on the Centre for the Cultural History of War’s website, and may be selected for a ‘special edition’ of the European Review of History/ Revue européene d’histoire.

Contact: Rebecca Gill and Jo Laycock, History Department, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL
gillrebecca@hotmail.com jo_armenia@hotmail.com