Description
Museums, memorials, and exhibitions are sites through which societies represent, enact, and curate conflict. As privileged sites for diplomatic visits, official state ceremonies, and international tourism, these sites provide salient arenas for (trans)national communication and public debate on military intervention, warfare, and terrorism, amongst other manifestations of violence and conflict. This roundtable will investigate this ‘new frontier’ in International Relations by bringing together researchers who combine empirical analysis with theoretical discussions on the political significance of the curation of conflict in artistic, educational, and commemorative institutions. We invite contributors to address the use of art-inspired methods in research on world politics; the (transnational) politics and economics of curation; the place of museums, galleries and memorials in economies of affect and emotion; relics and materiality, and the international political significance of the cultural realm. We invite authors to draw on rich traditions of work on museums, memorials, in exhibitions in other disciplines such as history of art, anthropology, sociology, and heritage and museum studies, and bring using these to challenge and revisit current understandings of violent conflict as it is known in IR. Conversely, bringing an IR lens to bear on the curation of conflict will positively contribute to overcome naïve or depoliticised accounts of such practices in other disciplines (Sylvester 2015, 4; Lisle 2016, 192–99).
