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University of Brighton
Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence
Research Cluster’s project on ‘Contesting Britain at War’
Workshop 8-9 June, 2017
Call for contributions
The Understanding
Conflict Research Cluster at the University will be hosting a two-day workshop on a new collaborative and interdisciplinary project entitled: ‘Contesting Britain at War’ (details below). We have five spaces available, and invite those who are interested
in contributing to the project to send a brief (no more than 250 words) account of why they are interested in, and what they would contribute to, the project. The workshop will be free, with travel costs of up to £100 per person covered by the Conflict Cluster.
If you are interested in attending, please e-mail Ian Sinclair <[log in to unmask]>
by 14 April 2017 with your statement of interest.
Contesting Britain at War:
Britain has been almost continually at war since 1914, including the two World Wars, colonial engagements in Africa, the Middle East and in East Asia, war in the Malvinas/Falklands
and in the north of Ireland/Northern Ireland, and further interventions in the Middle East as part of the 'war on terror'.
The Conflict Cluster is proposing a long-term project on ‘Contesting Britain at War’. Through an interdisciplinary nexus
of historical, political, sociological, philosophical and visual modes of critical inquiry, this project will explore how these wars have been criticised,
opposed and contested, both at home and — crucially — abroad by both academics and by activists. These contestations range from large anti-war protest movements and anti-colonial struggles to smaller,
everyday acts of resistance and revolt. Contesting Britain at War is also a matter of critical reflection on the injustice of war and of theoretical
analyses of, and activist challenges to, the role war plays in legitimising other forms of political action, including the building of nuclear weapons,
the building of military bases, the suspension of civil liberties and practices of internment, rendition and torture. Finally, Contesting Britain at War involves direct action and support for those negatively affected by war, including recent cross-border
activist support for refugees displaced by war.
Workshop aims:
- understanding multi-sited modes of 'contesting Britain at war’ and locating solidarities between different sites of contestation;
- understanding historical & conceptual continuities and discontinuities between different forms/tactics of contestation;
- developing a cross-disciplinary and transnational network of scholarship and activism.
Workshop themes:
- direct critique of the British state's forms and modes of military interventions, counter-insurgency and counter-terror tactics; and
of practices of ‘war’ broadly construed;
- critique of militarisation and securitisation associated with Britain’s wars;
- histories of anti-war activism in the UK, analysis of transnational interconnections with revolutionary anti-imperialism and networks of solidarity;
- resistance to Empire (anti-colonial revolts & processes of decolonisation) and its unfinished legacies, the politics of memory, silencing, concealment of archives, excavation and reparation;;
- critical reflection on the contemporary salience of these histories in the conjuncture of neoliberal imperialism and ‘the war on terror’.