War & Society

The team consists of a diverse group of NIOD researchers who, in addition to their own projects, cooperate on themes that have been identified collectively and are considered relevant for further exploration. This may result in conferences, workshops, fellowship programmes, or podcasts, ranging from internal discussions about the development of new research lines and projects to international meetings with colleagues and interested parties.

The War & Society core team believes that, when conducting research on war and mass violence, it is important for us to reflect on our own position and perspectives and find ways to account for them.

In recent years, the core team’s activities have ranged from an international conference on the theme of Negotiating Displacement (2019), setting up and developing its own NIOD podcast series (since 2018), experimenting with new, interactive forms of (virtual) workshops and meetings (since 2020), to having its own fellow group collaborate with NIAS on ‘Notes on a Research Agenda’ (2021).

Over the next few years, the War & Society team will continue to elaborate on the new ideas that have emerged from the cooperation with the fellow group, and to set up longreads, podcasts, and different kinds of workshops and meetings for both close colleagues and the general (international) public.

Projects of the War & Society core team

• The team is organising a workshop in June entitled: "The Past, Present and Future of MassViolence: Debates and Direction"
• Global War, Global Catastrophe. Neutrals, Belligerents and the Transformations of the First World War by Ismee Tames and Maartje Abbenhuis (2021) won the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr., prize for 2021 for the best work of history in English on World War One (1914-1918)
• Ismee Tames: Unlocking the Experience of Statelessness: New research project in the making, using new methods and global, interconnected historical examples to explore what it means to be stateless.
• Marleen van den Berg: Jewish Rotterdam: PhD research into the persecution and disenfranchisement of Jews during the war and the restoration of justice after the war. 
• Anne van Mourik: Conflicting Legacies of Hunger in Germany: PhD research into the commemoration of war-related times of hunger in Germany.
• Kylie Thomas: Women, Photography and Resistance in Transnational Perspective, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship, 2019-2021. Kylie will be doing a fellowship in Florence from April at the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence.
• Peter Romijn: Independence, decolonisation, war, and violence in Indonesia, 1945-1950, subproject on the political and administrative aspects of the war (together with Prof. Remco Raben).  
• Peter Romijn: The Long War. The Netherlands as a Warring Nation, 1940-1950
• Milan van Lange: War and Emotions: A computer-assisted analysis of war-related emotions in Dutch political debate (1945-1989). This PhD project focuses on the role of emotions in the post-war parliamentary debate on the social consequences of the German occupation during World War II. The aim of the project is to look into computer-assisted research of the role emotions played in the post-war treatment of war consequences experienced by different groups of survivors, such as war victims or former resistance fighters.