History Now! Peace and Trust in Historical Perspective

2021 is the United Nations International Year of Peace and Trust. This initiative aims ‘to promote peace and trust among nations based on, among other things, political dialogue, mutual understanding, and cooperation, in order to build sustainable peace, solidarity and harmony’. Our panel brings together researchers working on different periods and places— from the middle ages to the twentieth century, and between Africa, Europe, and South Asia—in order to put ‘peace and trust’ in historical perspective. How do ideas about peace and trust vary across cultures? How effective are institutions like the UN in resolving conflicts? And how might historians of peace and trust shape policy in this area in the future?

The panel involves the following speakers:

Beth Brewer is researching women and the Rwandan Genocide for a PhD in Durham’s History Department.

Ben Hildred is working on cricket and reconciliation in mid-twentieth-century Sri Lanka for a PhD in Durham’s Anthropology Department.

Harry Mawdsley is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen and will soon return to Durham as Assistant Professor in Early Medieval History. He works on the legal, social and political histories of the post-Roman successor states, and is completing a book on exile in the early medieval West.