This article examines how Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia have transformed cultural heritage into a component of national security. Drawing on securitization theory and cultural security, it argues that museums, heritage districts, and cultural megaprojects are used not only for tourism and nation branding, but to reinforce identity, legitimise political authority, and manage the uncertainties of globalisation and the post-oil transition. Through a comparative analysis of national visions, museum developments, and flagship projects, the study identifies three distinct models of heritage securitisation: Qatar's defence of linguistic and moral authenticity, the UAE's performance of cosmopolitanism and openness, and Saudi Arabia's state-led programme of cultural transformation and narrative control. It argues that heritage has become a central instrument of governance and international projection, while generating new tensions, contradictions, and contested identities.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, ephemera quickly became a key way of understanding and recording the conflict. From collection drives through to postcards home, people at all levels embraced the communicative nature of ephemera, using it to document, remember, and share understandings of the war. However, this wide-ranging appreciation of ephemeral material has not always been fully appreciated by historians, who are often reticent to work with the full breadth of wartime ephemera. Taking the multitude of ephemera produced in wartime conditions as our central theme, three case studies linked to the First World War provide an idea of how reading war and its aftermath through ephemera can offer new intellectual avenues to explore social and cultural history. When ephemera is the focus, rather than a byproduct, of our historical investigations, what fresh insights can we glean from people's interaction with this material?
This introduction lays out the case for Humanities scholars approaching the study of modern war through the lens of ephemera. Noting a range of pertinent scholarship published in the last two decades that draws on ephemera as sources, it explores the twentieth century as a coinciding of mass-produced ephemera and mass-participation warfare that generated its own ephemera in vast numbers. The special issue editors argue that by expanding our definition of ephemera beyond print items and understanding them as a gateway to everyday experience in wartime, scholars of war can gain insight into customarily overlooked or marginalized aspects of war experience. This includes not only state-sponsored warfare but counter-cultural resistance to war and all kinds of civic and armed struggle.
The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2022, poses an existential threat to the Ukrainian nation and identity. Alongside the military defence of Ukraine, music has served as a way to rally morale and express pride in Ukrainian identity. This study investigates the discourses about Ukrainian identity in Ukrainian music during the period of March to December 2022. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how Ukrainian identity is constructed primarily through lyrics but also instrumentation and samples of speech. Drawing on Social Identity Theory, the study shows how Ukrainian identity is constructed in entirely opposing terms to the perceived Russian identity. In the data set, Ukrainians are represented (1) as united and (2) as heroes, while Russians are vilified in various ways. The study demonstrates the important role pop music plays at times of war, and how language can be used to bolster in-group identity and morale.
This article examines representations of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) in Nazi Germany, centring specifically on Hermann Harder's episodic work Irische Heimkehr (Irish Journey Home), published originally in 1937. This is read in relation to all of the other 'Ireland books' published in this period which also depict the civil war, as part of an Irish-German cultural transfer history. Nazi-era representations of the Irish Civil War invariably view it essentially as a tragedy, either venerating & Eacute;amon de Valera as a 'strongman' figure or seeing the war in terms of the incomplete territorialisation of nationality, while other authors remain pro-treaty and view this side of the civil war as representing 'order'. These authors use Irish events and recent Irish history to make implicit, and sometimes explicit, arguments that relate to Germany. All of these aspects are to be seen in Irische Heimkehr, while the book also makes calls for military heroism.
This article explores how cartoon culture helped Australian airmen imprisoned in Stalag Luft III cope with captivity during the Second World War. By focusing on their adoption of 'kriegie talk' and the appropriation or creation of cartoon alter egos - Pilot Officer Percy Prune, Donald Duck, and Kriegie Joe - it examines the linguistic and visual practices through which prisoners of war (POWs) asserted identity and mediated emotion. These figures, recorded in wartime log books and camp newspapers, functioned as affective tools and narrative devices, enabling POWs to manage shame, negotiate moral dilemmas, and sustain martial masculinity. Ultimately, they told (and continue to relate) a story of emotional survival. By foregrounding the affective dimension of Stalag Luft III's cartoon culture, this study contributes to the historiographies of captivity, cartooning, and the history of emotions.
The article explores how the constitutional changes introduced with the Ohrid Framework Agreement that altered the Macedonian character of the State, came to be widely perceived by many ethnic Macedonians as the source of ontological insecurity. Introducing the concept of ontological security requirements, the article also shows how and why the 'Macedonian' character of the State became ethnic Macedonians' primary ontological security requirement. It further demonstrates that the idea of autochthonism emerged as the State's strategy in the pursuit of ontological security and has been the driving force behind the numerous State-sponsored cultural interventions in the Macedonian public space, culminating in the 'Skopje 2014 project', aimed at visually and materially conveying the autobiographical narrative of autochthonism. To further develop this argument, the article also introduces the concept of 'territorialization of heritage', which together with autochthonism became the strategy for reasserting ownership of the State and for addressing the ontological anxiety.
This essay focuses on two recent Russian films, Beanpole 2019 (dir. Kantemir Balagov) and A Siege Diary 2020 (dir. Andrei Zaitsev), that explore the tactile dimensions of war and trauma. I trace how the experiences of war qualitatively impact the female characters' experience of touch, relying on its quality of reversibility or reciprocity, as articulated by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although the two films ultimately deliver opposing messages about whether touch can be healed, Beanpole and A Siege Diary may both be interpreted as cinematic responses to one of the exhortations of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich's pathbreaking oral history of Soviet women's participation in World War II: bring back the body (Alexievich 2018: xviii).
This study examines the bodily experiences and representations of war in contemporary Ukrainian art imposed by Russia's war against Ukraine, arguing that analysed art works articulate a new visual language of the 'war body'. Through the study of the practices of Kateryna Lysovenko, Lada Nakonechna, Lesia Khomenko, and Alina Kleytman, the article proposes that war produces not only physical injury and displacement but also profound ruptures in subjectivity, agency, and visibility. These artists reveal how the body becomes simultaneously hyper-exposed and dehumanized, militarized and anonymized, documented and erased - traversing the space between individual experience and collective suffering. The paper argues that their works challenge conventional representations of wartime suffering by embracing ambiguity, foregrounding a gender-neutral understanding of vulnerability and expanding the concept of the body to include its spatial, symbolic, and political extensions, addressing themes such as migration, displacement, violence and military embodied performativity.
This article analyzes Maryna Er Gorbach's film Klondike (2022), an impressive piece of Ukrainian art-house cinema that centers women's experience of Russia's ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine. By departing from what Walt Whitman termed the 'red business' of war (Whitman, W., 1982. Complete poetry and selected prose. New York: Library of America, p. 417), the film foregrounds the everyday, embodied experience of its heroine, producing a distinctive form of cinematic realism and emotional intensity. The article argues that Er Gorbach reconfigures normative femininity as both a site of constraint and agency, thereby challenging dominant conventions of war cinema. Drawing on feminist film theory and transnational cinema studies, the article situates Klondike within broader discourse on marginalized communities and non-Western knowledge production.
Ukraine-born immigrants in Israel simultaneously experience the Russo-Ukrainian war, associated with their country of origin, and the Israel-Hamas war, linked to their host country. Extending existing research on interpreting in war by incorporating a migration perspective, this study examines long-term immigrants from Ukraine in Israel who engage in both professional and non-professional interpreting across diverse settings. Drawing on in-depth interviews, I argue that within their epiphanic experience, the personal and professional trajectories intersect and are reexamined and transformed. Ukraine-born immigrants revisit their native and working languages and capitalize on the Ukrainian language and origin; work in various settings for clients they rarely interpreted before; and violate the traditional boundaries of the interpreter role. Along with interlingual translation, they also engage in cultural translation, (re)interpreting themselves and their origin and host countries, and experiencing in-between belonging within and beyond their interpreting activities.
This is the introduction to the special issue 'Bodies in War: Contemporary Perspectives on Ukraine and Russia'. It contextualizes the special issue in terms of recent scholarly developments in the field, including the corporeal turn in war studies, the focus on war as an embodied experience, and the sensory dimensions of war. It highlights gender as a key theme for the contributors to the special issue, noting that several of the contributors emphasize the particularity of women's experiences, as well as the ways in which war can challenge or collapse gender binaries. It situates our special issue within the current transformations in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, with the move to decentre Russia and foreground Ukrainian voices.
This paper addresses an ideological construction of denialism in Pakistani cinema, which primarily focuses on the post-1971 war refutations through affirmative interpretations of history. Previously, Pakistani cinema's recent development and evolution have been appraised and praised for breaking free from the traditional paradigm. The recent development of denialism in Pakistani cinema remains ignored but offers the opportunity to deconstruct and understand the politics of denialism. Taking two Pakistani films, Khel Khel Mein (Nabeel Qureshi, 2021) and Huey Tum Ajnabi (Kamran Shahid, 2023), as a case study, this paper explores what we term Pakistani denialist cinema, demystifying ideological manoeuvring and historical distortions. We argue that films embed denialist and patriotic ideology into depicting historical events, producing a particular history. We argue that the selected films produce an illusionary 'reality effect' that hegemonizes the spectators into a denialist perspective concerning the 1971 war.
This article examines how modern Greece drew on its ancient heritage to speak about the Cold War and the Greek Civil War in 1944-74. It shows how classical Hellenism was used by the official anti-communist discourse of Ethnikofrosyni to justify the fight against domestic and international communism. It argues that war was verbally, visually, and spatially constructed as an idealized notion of heroic and spiritual distinction by Western bearers of classical civilization over the 'barbaric' forces of the 'East', while on the ground, it was fought in a brutal manner that disregarded classical conventions of 'just war' and 'respect for the defeated'. The analysis, finally, contrasts the official state discourse with alternative receptions of the classical past among avant-garde Greek artists, like filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis and playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, who used the country's classical heritage to criticize war and challenge the bogus neoclassicism of the postwar Ethnikofron state.
This special issue addresses the entanglement of various expressions of classicism with modern war in the long twentieth century, from the Great War to its centenary commemorations. By revisiting varied expressions and concepts of classicism through broader geographic and temporal lenses and by approaching the various topics with fresh questions, the six essays in this collection bring new findings to the scholarship around classicism and war. The issue features themes on art and disability, war and disillusionment, local war memorials, masculine identities, the poetry of unease, and national aggrandizement. Collectively, the articles encourage us to think in terms of multiple classicisms, to recognize instability and fluidity within classicisms, to acknowledge paradoxes and ambiguities, to emphasize the role of culture, and to better engage with inclusivity.
This paper examines Australian artist Mervyn Napier Waller, whose arm was amputated after wounding in the fighting at Bullecourt during the First World War. During rehabilitation, Napier Waller adapted his left hand to draw and eventually became one of the most important muralists the country produced. The essay focuses on the large-scale works which depict an Australian postwar utopia envisaged through an idealized and modernist vision of the classical past, exploring the artist's disability alongside his classical vision of muscular, whole bodies. It seeks to understand Waller's oeuvre in the context of postwar discourses about the war disabled, and how he navigated his new disabled identity through the classical ideal and through large-scale works that transcended the trauma of war with beautiful bodies, free of pain or fragility. However, the artist himself sought help for phantom pain in his later life. . The paper explores the artist's experiments with self-representation and argues that Waller's classicism reflects a personal, ambivalent interplay between real and ideal bodies, suggestive of a more complex understanding of classicism in response to modern war than is usually understood.
In this article, we discuss how the ongoing Russia's invasion of Ukraine transformed Estonia's attitudes toward material legacy of the Soviet past. Our nodal points for research are the Estonian government's policies of relocations of monuments semantically associated with the communist power. Such a perspective allows us to demonstrate how these practices of de-glorification triggered new narratives aimed to legitimize or delegitimize, as well as securitize and de-securitize the continued public exposure of the material symbols of foreign domination. The theoretical framework of our approach is a combination of heritage studies, post-colonial literature, and the concept of securitization; our main methods are visual and discourse analysis. Our database consists of participant observation materials, field notes, along with a panoply of public narratives (policy stakeholders' speeches, position statements and media debates).
The living dead is a powerful figure. In general it is associated with horror and a mindless mass bent on feeding off the living. However, the figure of the living dead may be adapted to many different contexts. Tobias Warner has shown that the living dead readily lends itself to the study of the socio-economic situation in post-colonial Africa. By extending the historical context to colonial Senegal before and during World War One, I demonstrate that the theme of the living dead permeates an earlier period. In order to situate the context and examples, I use the work of author David Diop Fr & egrave;re d'Acirc;me. This article offers a pivot away from scholarship analysing the trauma of WWI by focusing on socio-economic concerns present in Diop's work. The welding together of these sources creates a larger picture of how the living dead represent the limitations of economic self-realization in Africa.
