On September 24 and 25, 2024, the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television at the University of Ljubljana hosted the international symposium titled War and Peace on Screen. This event addressed the pressing and complex issue of past and contemporary conflicts and their mediated representations, a topic increasingly relevant in today’s turbulent global landscape. As technological advances allow us unprecedented access to images and sounds from conflict zones, audiences worldwide are experiencing an intensified and often disorienting relationship with warfare imagery. The symposium responded to this phenomenon by gathering 29 researchers from 10 countries, aiming to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue that could unravel the evolving role of screens in portraying and impacting narratives of war and peace.

In setting the stage for critical inquiry, the symposium explored how developments in audiovisual technology have reshaped our interactions with war images, raising critical questions about ethics, responsibility, and engagement. A key theme addressed was the “posthuman gaze” — an emerging paradigm that suggests screens are no longer mere extensions of human experience but active agents shaping our collective consciousness around violence and peace. The symposium also posed essential questions about the role of media as both a potential propaganda tool and a platform for anti-war activism, interrogating the capacity of screens to simultaneously provoke empathy and desensitize viewers. Through these inquiries, participants sought to redefine the relationship between art, image, and the public’s understanding of conflict, drawing on both historical and contemporary examples.

Representing MEMPOP, two of our researchers, Natalija Majsova and Jasmina Šepetavc, attended the symposium.

Majsova presented a paper titled The Implicated Subject as a Posthuman Category: Re-Visiting Wartime Agency through Post-Yugoslav Film, which analysed video recording and projection technologies’ effect on our understanding of implicated subjects and implication as a prevalent mode of subjectivity in societies entangled with war and its aftermath. Building on Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject, Majsova analyzed how media ecology allows us to explore nuanced wartime subjectivities that transcend the traditional victim-perpetrator binary, instead considering people ‘on the margins’ of war. Through an examination of post-Yugoslav films produced in the 2020s, including The Eclipse (2022), The Happiest Man in the World (2022), and Souvenirs of War (2023), she highlighted how the camera operates as a pedagogical tool, challenging audiences to rethink agency in contexts of conflict and underscoring the vital, often under-researched role of media in shaping memory and responsibility.

Šepetavc presented a paper titled Queer War Traumas and Utopias of Peace, which addressed an often-overlooked dimension in cinematic representations of war: the intersection of queerness and war trauma. Through a comparative analysis of queer narratives in post-Yugoslav and Ukrainian films, Šepetavc explored how queerness is either obscured or rendered invisible within dominant narratives of conflict, often due to prevailing heteronormative ideologies. Focusing on films such as Marble Ass (1995) and Simeiz (2022) she examined how queer subjects navigate and resist wartime heteronormativity, ultimately proposing that these films offer alternative visions of community and peace. These film works underscore the potential of queer perspectives not only to challenge conventional portrayals of war trauma but also to imagine radical futures that transcend entrenched nationalist ideologies.

As the organizers wrote in their programme: “The increasingly tangible possibility of a devastating global conflict has shrunk the space for philosophical distance, and it demands commitment and action from all of us.” The War and Peace on Screen symposium provided a fertile platform for advancing the discourse on media’s evolving influence in wartime contexts, particularly through interdisciplinary and critical approaches exploring contemporary modes and implications of visualizing war (and peace).