Professor Marie Breen-Smyth's Inaugural Lecture

Professor Breen-Smyth joined the School of Politics at the University of Surrey in February 2011 as Chair in International Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for International Intervention.

Professor Breen-Smyth has written and researched political violence including its impact on civilian populations and is one of the initiators of a critical approach to terrorism studies and a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Critical Terrorism Studies. Her interests in international intervention include processes of militarization and demilitarization, transitional justice, armed conflict and children. She has also written on field research methods and ethics in violent contexts. Her regional interests include South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and former Yugoslavia.

When the Past is Present: the Casualty, the Body and Politics

Abstract

Accounting for casualties of armed conflict provides a way of assessing the human cost of war, supporting or undermining claims to victimhood, victory or human rights violations and ultimately the justness ad bellum and in bello of war itself. It can show which side has suffered most, killed most, who kills the most and who kills civilians and what methods of killing are used. Yet such counting is fraught with methodological challenges and is often conducted amid a maelstrom of contest and propaganda. Counting civilian casualties is the subject of a current campaign by the Oxford Research Group aimed at ensuring the i nclusion of civilians in fatal casualty figures.  However, not all casualties die: many are maimed, disabled and continue to live with the bodily consequences of armed conflict. They continue to live in a divided society, often in close proximity to those who injured them, their bodily injuries and scars a continual reminder of past violence. Based fieldwork counting casualties in Northern Ireland over the last fifteen years that incorporated the use of participant action research and film, Marie Breen-Smyth considers some of the implications of including those injured in armed conflict in measurements of the costs of conflict, for managing violent pasts, thinking about truth recovery and justice and in designing processes of societal reconciliation.  In recognition of International Women’s Day, the lecture will focus specifically on how such effects are gendered. 

Lord Alderdice FRCPsych, will act as the opening speaker. 

Registration via the link below