The Understanding Conflict Research Cluster is comprised of nine research areas: four geographical and five thematic. Colleagues will often work across multiple research areas, typically when doing thematic work which has a geographical focus, or geographical work which has a thematic focus.
The Cluster’s geographical areas cover Palestine and the Middle East; the Balkans; Ireland; and Latin America. Each geographical location is characterised by an interest in the lived experience of the locale, the forms of remembering and memorialisation in the region, their relationship to the idea of a ‘post-conflict’ space and place, and the relationship between the local and the international.
The Cluster’s thematic areas cover ‘Representation and Remembrance’; ‘Total War’; ‘Terror and Torture’; ‘Sites and Spaces of Conflict’; and ‘Theorising Conflict’. Within each area there is a shared concern with the meaning of war and violence and their effects on wider social and cultural formations, whether this be through legacies of memorialisation, the shifting understandings of terror and torture, the conceptual deployment of conflict, or the spaces and places that comprise the ‘post-conflict’.
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