The Violence of War: Images and Experiences of Conflict

战争在现代历史中起着重要作用。该项目以一种新颖的方式研究它们的影响。它的工作假设是，士兵和平民在征兵和大规模战争时代的军事冲突经历造成了对战争的恐惧和抵制，尽管很少被承认，但这些恐惧和抵制改变了想象、宣布和发动战争的条件。民族主义者对防御的迫切要求和围绕战斗现实的禁忌掩盖了这种对战争的反对。我的发现将对其他学科和领域，如历史社会学和国际关系产生影响。我自己对德国（《人民战争》）的研究认为，拿破仑战争或“解放战争”、统一战争和第一次世界大战决定性地改变了欧洲大陆国家之间的权力分配和关系，并影响了一系列德国政权的建设和稳定。该研究探讨了士兵和平民在战争期间如何经历这种冲突，以及在和平时期如何表达和理解这些冲突。如果没有这样的理解，就很难理解过去两个世纪以来德国和欧洲政治的戏剧性变化。我认为，轻松-或不情愿-与德国人去战争，以及这种战争对国内政治的深远影响，与长期转型同时代的冲突的概念。我的研究重新评估了现代德国史学中的普遍观点，即民族国家时代的战争被视为一种光荣的、必要的或不可避免的集体努力，达尔文的竞争或大国的无政府状态证明了这一点。它问的是，这种观点如何能够与士兵自己对战争的恐惧和恐惧、他们不愿意妖魔化敌人以及他们在大规模征兵期间随时准备质疑国家的传统理由相协调。该项目的个人和合作部分都调查了在国外持续、据称英勇和越来越不分青红皂白地使用暴力与在国内扩大管制和禁止暴力行为和杀戮之间的紧张关系。在世纪上半叶，随着内阁战争演变为国家冲突，作为士兵的利比亚人被要求代表他们的国家杀人，但作为公民，他们被期望过着和平、受人尊敬和克制的生活。在战争期间，十九和二十世纪进步、文明或文化的支持者面临死亡、不道德和生存的徒劳。技术虽然使凶手远离了受害者，但却增加了杀戮和致残的程度、随机性和破坏性。这项研究旨在揭示这些经验和代表性的差异。该项目的合作部分将测试这些关于战争影响和军事冲突的公众形象的假设。举办了两次讲习班和一次国际会议，最后出版了一本关于暴力和打击（《战争的恐怖》），旨在促进跨学科议程：第一个讲习班将集中讨论文学批评、文化研究和艺术史以及历史的相关分支学科的方法和研究结果;第二个研讨会将集中讨论历史，历史社会学，国际关系和战争研究。该项目的总体目标是改变相关学科对士兵和平民战争经验的研究，并建立长期研究网络和小组，这些网络和小组将在获奖后继续存在。

Wars have played a fundamental part in modern history. This project investigates their impact in a novel way. Its working hypothesis is that soldiers' and civilians' experiences of military conflict during an age of conscription and mass warfare created fears of and resistance to war that, though they were rarely acknowledged, altered the conditions under which wars were imagined, declared and waged. Nationalist imperatives of defence and taboos surrounding the realities of combat have obscured much of this opposition to war. My findings will have implications for other disciplines and fields such as historical sociology and international relations. My own research on Germany (The People's Wars) argues that the Napoleonic wars, or 'wars of liberation', the wars of unification and the First World War decisively altered the distribution of power and relations between states on the Continent, and affected the construction and stability of a series of German regimes. The study explores how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently represented and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterising the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. I argue that the ease - or reluctance - with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to long-term transformations in contemporaries' conceptualisation of conflict. My research reassesses the common view in the historiography of modern Germany that war in the age of the nation-state was seen as a glorious, necessary or inescapable collective endeavour, justified by Darwinian competition or the anarchy of great powers. It asks how such a view can be reconciled with soldiers' own horror and fear of war, their unwillingness to demonize the enemy and their readiness to question traditional reasons of state during a period of mass conscription. Both the individual and collaborative components of the project investigate the tension between the persistent, supposedly heroic and increasingly indiscriminate use of violence abroad and the expanding regulation and prohibition of violent acts and killing at home. As cabinet warfare turned into national conflict during the first half of the nineteenth century, civilians-as-soldiers were asked to kill on behalf of their nations, yet as citizens they were expected to live peaceful, respectable and restrained lives. In wartime, nineteenth and twentieth-century supporters of progress, civilization or culture were confronted with death, immorality and the futility of existence. Technology, although distancing the killer from his victim, increased the extent, randomness, and destructiveness of killing and maiming. This research aims to shed new light on these disparities of experience and representation. The collaborative component of the project will test these hypotheses about the impact of warfare and the public portrayal of military conflicts. Two workshops and an international conference, leading to the publication of an edited volume on experiences and representations of violence and combat (The Horrors of War), have been designed to facilitate an interdisciplinary agenda: the first workshop will concentrate on the approaches and findings of literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of art, together with relevant sub-disciplines of history; the second workshop will focus on history, historical sociology, international relations and war studies. The conference and edited volume will disseminate the results of this interdisciplinary collaboration.The project's overall aim is to transform the study of soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare in relevant academic disciplines and to establish longer-term research networks and groupings that will continue beyond the period of the award.