Conflict and Peace: The Cultural Dimension

This webinar launches the Special Issue on Conflict and Peace: The Cultural Dimension, published by Nationalism and Ethnic Politics in June 2025.

The Special Issue reflects on the expression and management of culture and cultural institutions, which are crucial – if overlooked – aspects of violent conflict, peacemaking, and peacebuilding.

During this roundtable, each of the authors will briefly introduce their contribution to the SI, which collectively deploy a variety of disciplines, case studies, and methods to explore the complex,  multilayered and interactive  relationship between cultural  expressions and institutions, and the political, territorial and socio-economic structures after violent conflict. 

Together, these works underscore that it is important to take symbols seriously when exploring and explaining conflict and peace. They also show that cultural expressions and institutions can feed directly into the military strategy and political economy of conflict and violence. Finally, they showcase a number of practices that help reinterpret cultural expressions, eroding mutually exclusive visions of national and ethnic membership in conflict-affected settings, and the obstacles to these practices. The presentations will be followed by a Q&A with the authors.   

Chair: Giuditta Fontana (University of Birmingham), Special Issue Editor and author of “Making Sense of the Cultural Dimension in Conflict-Affected Societies”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2025.2457782 

Roundtable participants (in alphabetical order):

• Laia Balcells Ventura (Georgetown University), presenting Balcells et al. “Remembering the violent past in ethnically divided societies”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2024.2411790

• Alexandra Budabin (EURAC), presenting Budabin et al, “How to Exhibit Competing Narratives: Confronting Legacies of Conflict or Sustaining Social Cleavages?”,https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2024.2411792

• Deniz Cil (University of Maryland), presenting Aronson et al, “Attacks on History: The Causes of Cultural Heritage Damage during Armed Conflict”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2024.2415784 and Cil et al, “Detecting Damage to Cultural Heritage during Armed Conflict Using the Case of Ukraine”,https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2024.2411794

• Iris Ivaniš (University of Ljubljana), presenting Ivaniš et al, ““Mine, Yours, Ours, No One’s”: Ethnonational Contestation and Heritagization on the Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s National Museum and Museum of Republika Srpska”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2025.2465205

• Elisabeth King (New York University), presenting “Hypotheses on Food and Peace: Five Ways to Use Social Gastronomy for Peacebuilding”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2024.2413469

• Oussama Benayad (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), presenting “Visualizing Peace: Filmic Artivism and the Path to Collective Healing in Morocco”, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2025.2467525