Panellists: Prof Santanu Das (Oxford), Prof Gary Sheffield (KCL), Dr Katharina Friege (Oxford), Dr Christina Goulter (KCL)

Chair: Dr Cathleen Sarti (Oxford)

What does it mean to bear witness to war in the age of livestreamed conflict? How do politics and emotions warp the intimacies and vagaries of bearing witness whether from a distance or from ground zero? If the Crimean War was the first to have been written about in real time for the public consumption of war news in print, the amplification of war broadcasting today seems to have complicated notions of complicity and observation thoroughly. Historically, wars have been witnessed by and affected different stakeholders differently. So much so that the very concept of having a stake in globalized conflicts on the basis of information that is allowed to percolate through dense war fog has undergone considerable mutations. This roundtable will seek to explore the quotidian and extraordinary ways in which combatants and captives, poets and artists, pacifists and warmongers, war-correspondents and photojournalists, and people living in home-fronts and struggling in war-zones among others have come to terms with their experiences of bearing witness to war. The panellists of this roundtable will also be encouraged to reflect on how as academics who study conflict professionally, they might personally reckon with the inescapability of witnessing warfare across the globe today.

This collaborative event is a part of ‘New Directions in the History of War’, the annual graduate conference jointly organised by the University of Oxford & the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War (King’s College London).