Art, Politics and Experience of Peace and War

Art, Politics and Experience of Peace and War Section chair: Frank Möller; co-chair: Susanna Hast 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 2015 General Conference, we panels and papers explore the relationship between art, politics and experience. In our sections in earlier ECPR conferences, much attention has been directed to questions pertaining to artistic representations of conflict, violence and war. While we are still interested in these issues, for the Montreal conference we elaborate on artistic representations of the experience of peace – including its everyday dimensions – and reconciliation after violent encounters. We are interested in artistic representations of the transformation of experience of violence into expectations of peace in the course of reconciliation processes. We also discuss contributions on artistic representations of the experience of peace decoupled from preceding violence including representations of the everyday. Richmond argues that ‘aspirations for peace are often represented through depictions of war and violence’ and we are surely interested in such representations but we are also looking for panels and papers on artistic representations of peace decoupled from war and violence. Thus, we want to explore what could be called peace art, the politics of peace art and, ultimately, the politics of peace. As always, the Standing Group’s understanding of art is a wide one including popular culture. We explicitly invite panels and papers offering alternative forms of presenting and communicating academic knowledge alongside standard paper-based presentations. In this section, there is included a special subsection: Art and representation in post-conflict societies Subsection chairs: Cynthia Milton and Ralph Buchenhorst This subsection proposes to bring together researchers and cultural agents working on questions of how to represent and witness through the arts violence and abuse of human rights in post-conflict societies. Having recently completed a volume on art in post-Shining Path Peru (Milton) and continuing to work on questions of representation after genocide (Buchenhorst), we wish to develop more fully topics raised in our previous research, placing them in a broader perspective of art in the aftermath of atrocity, and the role of artists and cultural agents in establishing what become “historical truths”. In the much-debated statement by Adorno that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, scholars have questioned the ethical and moral implications of art. Though very distinct historical events, and in the recent wake of post-Cold War and post-colonial induced conflicts and subsequent truth commissions of various types, art has flourished. This raises the question of not whether art in the wake of extreme violence is not possible, but rather if such violence does not in some way produce art. That is, is art a response to violence? What is the role of art in debates over establishing hegemonic historical narratives of past violence and some sort of social repair? How is art employed as a transitional justice practice? How can historians and social scientists incorporate such art into their methodology?