Politics and Arts of Peace

The ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts is committed to the Interdisciplinary study of art as a form of political discourse. For the 2016 General Conference, we invite Panels and Papers exploring the relationship between art, politics and experience of peace and war. In our Sections in earlier ECPR conferences, much attention has been directed to artistic representations of conflict, violence and war and we continue of being interested in these issues. For the Prague conference, however, we specifically welcome contributions elaborating artistic representations of both experience of peace – including its everyday dimensions – and reconciliation after violent encounters. Thus, we are focusing on discussing on the Art of Peace. Thus, we wish to explore artistic representations of the transformation of experience of violence into expectations of peace in the course of reconciliation processes. Richmond argues that ‘aspirations for peace are often represented through depictions of war and violence’ (Picasso’s Guernica, for example) and we are interested in such representations including its more subtle variations (Don McCullin’s photographs of English landscapes, for example, or other forms of aftermath art). We are, however, also looking for Panels and Papers exploring artistic representations of peace decoupled from war and violence including representations of the everyday. Here, the problem is that art has to represent peace without descending into triviality while at the same time being recognizable as art of peace. In sum, we want to explore what can be called peace art, the politics of peace art and, ultimately, peace art as a form of political discourse. The Politics and the Arts Standing Group’s understanding of art is a wide one including popular culture. We encourage Panels and Papers offering alternative forms of presenting and communicating academic knowledge alongside standard paper-based presentations.