The University of Manchester is committed to promoting informed debate on 
the major issues of our time. One of the most pressing issues concerns the 
changing nature and consequences of war. Today's news media are full of 
stories of war, the sources of armed conflict and its impact on 
individuals and societies. The international conference, War and our 
World, provides an opportunity to address this recurrent feature of human 
society.

The conference will take the form of a series of platform debates, 
conference panels and other events including live performances. We have 
invited several prominent speakers to take part in the platform debates, 
Urvashi Butalia, Rony Brauman, Abdel-Rahman Ghandour, Anatol Lieven and 
Joseph Stiglitz have all provisionally accepted, with Anna Ford and 
Admiral Sir John Kerr agreeing to chair the platforms. Performance 
practitioners have been invited from places such as Kosovo, Sri Lanka, 
Burundi, Northern Ireland and the Palestinian territories. The other 
conference sessions are organised around four broad themes (causes, 
technologies, bodies, legacies) and seven cross-cutting strands (ethics, 
media, performance, security, population displacement, humanitarianism, 
memory), with the aim of encouraging maximum flexibility and 
interdisciplinarity. 

There will be various parallel sessions, and our chosen format allows for 
participants to devise their own programme according to preference. The 
themes/ strands are outlined below; the following grid will give an idea 
of what we envisage. Please indicate the cross-section of theme(s) and 
strand(s) that you feel your paper may fall into: [Please see website]

The strands have been chosen to reflect a range of concerns, such as the 
ethical issues at stake in researching war; the waging of war upon the 
media as well as the 'war of words'; the ways in which war and peace are 
performed; the meanings and practice of 'security' in the modern world; 
the relationship between wars and population displacement; the meanings 
and practice of humanitarianism in wartime; and the memory and 
commemoration of war.

Causes: Analysing the causes of violent conflict has a long heritage, from 
Sun Tzu to Woodrow Wilson's call to 'investigate the causes of war and the 
conditions of peace'. The alleged emergence of 'new wars' has at first 
sight challenged this approach. Since President Clinton famously faxed 
Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy to every US embassy, it has become 
common in policy-making circles to emphasise the cultural, intractable and 
avaricious causes of new wars. This theme seeks to respond to such a 
usurpation of the academic study of the causes of violence and war. It 
seeks contributions focused on developing a critical understanding of the 
causes of both the so-called new wars and their 'spillover' onto the 
streets of Western cities following 9/11 that respond to, and get beyond, 
the current focus on greed, barbarism and civilisation.

Technologies: The 'new wars/old wars' debate speaks to a large number of 
issues ranging from the development of new weapons and offensive 
technologies, and debates about science, technology and the 'new 
terrorism'. Ethical issues are at stake in each instance. Technology 
operates in contributing to the displacement of population and to 
humanitarian intervention in crises of violence. What technological means 
are at the disposal of societies having to deal with the aftermath of war, 
such as the need to clear landmines?

Bodies: Pain, injury, suffering, and healing embody the extremes of war. 
This theme will consider the impact of war on the body and the mind. The 
treatment of the body is at the heart of ethical questions and of media 
representation. The suffering body and displaced populations challenge 
humanitarian responses and security imperatives. War violates bodies, 
enduring in memory, in physical scars, in trauma. How are memories of war 
embodied beyond mute trauma? Can performance initiate a process of 
healing? This theme therefore invites contributions addressing such issues 
as war and the construction of corporeality; state mechanisms in 
launching, justifying and ameliorating the consequences of war; how 
disability is structured and managed in civilian and peacetime contexts; 
sexual violence as an institution of state/military violence; and the 
narrative and performative formats in which bodies are represented.

Legacies: The legacies of war continue to affect communities and global 
politics long after conflict has ended. This strand asks contributors to 
consider the ethical implications of war in our world. This theme speaks 
to philosophical and legal inquiry about warfare and conflict resolution. 
Furthermore, it considers the cultural consequences of representing 
suffering, whether in the media, in the performing arts or within the 
field of humanitarian aid. Indeed, medicine, psychology and counselling 
are deeply immersed in treating the traumatic consequences of conflict. 
The legacies of war also reach into the politics of international security 
and affect the movement of populations and how displaced peoples are 
perceived in the public realm. The politics of memory and commemoration 
have been understood as the endpoint for studies into the impact of war 
and conflict. Memory studies cut across disciplinary boundaries and 
theorise formations of collective, social, cultural, individual, traumatic 
and national memory. The residues of war produce cultural memories through 
film, literature, spaces of museums and the design of monuments. This 
strand invites explorations of theory in relation to specific cases of 
conflict.

Supported by the Hallsworth Fund, 'War and Our World' has been designed to 
encourage participation from a broad range of disciplines and to 
facilitate interdisciplinary conversations. To this end it is being 
organised by the University of Manchester's Centre for Interdisciplinary 
Research in the Arts (CIDRA) in association with colleagues from the 
Faculty of Humanities, the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures (SAHC), 
AHRC-funded project In Place of War (IPOW), Policy Research in 
Engineering, Science and Technology (PREST), and the Institute for 
Development Policy and Management (IDPM). 

Papers from any discipline and from contributors at all stages of their 
career are now invited. The organising committee will select papers that 
correspond to the broad and interdisciplinary aims of the conference. 
Please send outline proposals (maximum 300 words) to Dr Bex Lewis: 
[log in to unmask] no later than 20 October 2006.

More information can be found on: 
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/warandourworld