Event Host: Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Tarak Barkawi is professor of international relations at London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a scholar of war and empire. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times.
Abstract
Battle is radically under-theorized as a concept, despite its obvious historical importance. Battle appears as a self-evident fact, a real event with potentially decisive consequences. But battles are also constituted by interpretation. This talk uses battle to explore some of the relations between war and knowledge about war. Soldiers participate both in battle and in the production of histories about it. Accordingly, the genre of battle history emerges as a crucial form of mediation between warfront and homefront in the Anglo-American West. The talk closes by outlining a research project on the connections between war experience and history-writing, one which puts both fighting and interpretation in the same analytic frame.