Annual Event Series 2022-23: War & Peace

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has trampled on the principle of national sovereignty, disrupted trade and food security, upended the EU’s decarbonization efforts, and triggered a sharp reduction of cultural budgets to finance the building up of military capacities across European countries. We have invited historians and cultural scholars to grapple with the political, economic, and cultural implications of this war, and understand its longer prehistory. All events will go 4:30-6pm, with reception and dinner to follow.

Mario Daniels (October 5, 2022): “U.S. Foreign Policy and the New (?) Geopolitics of Technology”

Technological leadership is a key resource of U.S. power projection in the international system. Institutions, regulations and practices of sharing and denying technology are powerful instruments of U.S. diplomacy not least vis-à-vis enemies in times of war (currently Russia) and strategic rivals like China. Our session will have a closer look at the principles and mechanisms of technology regulation, will analyze their crucial role for waging (economic) war, and will place them in their complex historical context since World War I. Mario Daniels is DAAD Professor at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. He is a historian specializing in the history of science and technology in the twentieth century.

Karen Hagemann (Nov 1, 2022): “Gender, Military Violence and War: Conceptualization and Research”

The presentation will after a brief discussion of the three key concepts “gender,” “war” and “violence” from a gender perspective first deconstruct the construct of the male power to injure and the female vulnerability to injury, which is deeply ingrained in the tradition of Western military culture, and then discuss the gender paradox embedded in this construct with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century warfare, including the current war in Ukraine. Karen Hagemann is the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published widely in Modern German and European history and Gender history. Her most recent publication is the Oxford Handbook of Gender and War since 1600 (with Stefan Dudink and Sonya O. Rose, Oxford University Press, 2020). Currently she is preparing a monograph titled Forgotten Soldiers: Women, the Military and War in Modern European History, 1600-2000. She is also the director of the Digital Humanities Project “GWonline, the Bibliography, Filmography and Webography on Gender and War since 1600”

Caren Kaplan (March 30, 2023): “Aerial Infrastructures:  No-Fly Zones and Atmospheric Politics”

The air above our heads is an element that we all seemingly share–a space of freedom. But the way that this universal and increasingly vulnerable element becomes perceived as territory—linked to private, public, governmental, military, civil, industrial or commercial interests—is a story entangled with the histories of cartography, meteorology, aviation, urbanism and the built environment, among other things. The no-fly zone—which is so often touted as a humanitarian tactic— must be considered instead as a powerful example of militarist territorialization and policing in the service of atmospheric politics. Caren Kaplan is Professor of American, Cultural Studies, and Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent book is Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2018).