Projects

One of our team members – Ideja Bajra – has been diving deep into cell biology to explore its potential for visualising peace and peacebuilding in productive new ways. Using AI to…

We often think about peace in relation to conflict; but peace is also something that we experience – and can build – in our ordinary, everyday lives, both near and far from…

In October 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted a Landmark Resolution on Women, Peace and Security (UNSCR 1325).  It expressed concern that civilians, particularly women and children, account for the vast majority of those adversely…

I have been part of this research project since it started in January 2022, and the magnitude of my learning journey is difficult to articulate. Initially, I was interested in how peace…

‘There is no peace without justice’. This oft-repeated mantra papers over the complex reality of peacebuilding: while post-conflict justice is essential to sustainable peace, the search for justice can sometimes prove a…

Over the course of our project, we have benefited from the generosity of a host of guest lecturers – including feminist scholar, peacebuilding practitioner and storyteller Dr Roxani Krystalli. Together with her…

War memorials have long played a role in marking the transition from war to peace and in post-conflict recovery. Several members of the Visualising Peace team have researched the storytelling done by…

What kinds of music help you to feel ‘at peace’? How might you represent peace in music?  What would a musical representation of peacebuilding (as opposed to peace itself) sound like? (How)…

The close connections between climate change and conflict – and between climate sustainability and peace – are increasingly recognised. Several members of the Visualising Peace team have been exploring human-environment relations, the…

Experts on militarisation stress the impact of everyday militarisms in our popular culture and physical environment, and have highlighted fashion as a medium that can embed military images, ideals, acceptance and aspiration into our…

The landscape of war, propagated by history books and news media, haunts the social imaginary with images of defense infrastructure, environmental destruction, and mass human casualty. As with more insidious forms of…

I joined the Vertically Integrated Project on “Visualising Peace” in my second semester of uni. Alongside gaining a variety of new perspectives on issues surrounding peace, one of the new inputs I…

Several members of the Visualising Peace team have been exploring the complex relationships that have evolved over time between different religious movements and belief systems and ideas of peace and approaches to…

‘The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes…’ United Nations Outer Space Treaty, 1967 Alongside research on local peace, architectural peace projects, and the relationship between peacemaking…

Dialogue is at the heart of peacebuilding. Adversarial styles of debate, in person and online, are driving conflict. These two truths have got us interested in exploring different approaches to discussion and…

Among other projects, we have been researching trends in peace education across different sectors and settings. Despite the enormous benefits of supporting young people to learn and think critically about peace and…

In 2023, our Visualising Peace team collaborated with a team of students studying game design through Abertay University’s MPROF programme, to explore the challenges and opportunities of designing and marketing an online…

We spend increasing amounts of our time using digital tools, navigating virtual worlds and inhabiting cyber space. Policy-makers and researchers are alert to the threats posed by cyberwarfare; as we discussed in…

This resource was created as part of the University of St Andrews’ Vertically Integrated Project Visualising Peace, which seeks to explore habits of narrating and representing peace, as well as how those…

Peace studies today often focuses on contemporary issues and very recent (21st or late 20th century) history; but we can learn a lot about current habits of visualising peace and peacebuilding by exploring imaginaries…

Language is a fundamental building block for peacebuilding, peaceful communication, and coexistence. Language itself is often also a political tool, adding another layer of complexity to an already dense and difficult process…

Several members of the Visualising Peace project have been researching representations of peace in different kinds of literature, and the role played by literature in shaping our habits of visualising peace. Student…

Over the past three years, the Visualising Peace team has been exploring the power of photography to represent and help build peace. We have learnt a lot from scholars working in visual…

Several members of our research team have been exploring peace-storytelling from different angles. We have drawn on a range of scholarship and practice along the way, including developments in ‘useful fiction’ and…

‘The friendly, fun-looking teddy bear in the picture below is relatively innocuous on its own; but the fact that we can pick a Peace Pal off the shelf in the Pentagon gift…

Peace gets built in many different ways, by many different actors. Our research team has been studying the range of roles played by NGOs in different peacebuilding processes, and also in humanitarian…

Photographs are world-building. They don’t just reflect the world around us: they shape what we know, colour how we think, and impact how we feel. They focus our gaze towards certain events…

Much has been written regarding the political, economic, and security challenges faced by contemporary peacebuilding efforts at the local, national, and international levels. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the…

My relationship to peace and “visualising peace” has changed dramatically since I began participating in the Visualising Peace project. When I began work with the project, it was with a tenuous grasp…

Extending our research on peace-storytelling habits, and our interest in using narratives in different media to deepen peace literacy, we have been collaborating with professional theatre company NMT Automatics, who specialise in using…

As we have learnt from several podcast guests (Emily Spiers, Will Slocombe & Matthew Brown and August Cole & Peter Singer), Futures Literacy is a skill or capability that we can all…