Session 6. War and wars

The First World War, with its overwhelming number of victims, ongoing suffering of soldiers on the battlefield, and technification of warfare, began “the descent into hell” that was consolidated by the Second World War. Between 1939 and 1945, 60% of the 40 million victims were innocent civilians, who were subjected to programmed extermination (the Holocaust), massive slaughters, forced labour, death due to starvation, or systemic bombings that culminated in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the second half of the 20^th century, colonial conflicts in the context of the Cold War, such as the wars in Indochina and Vietnam, transformed the experience of war into an unequal combat, although civilians were still the greatest victims, as has continued to be the case in the other wars of the 20^th and 21^st century. With the help of two renowned specialists, Joanna Bourke and Xosé Manoel Núñez Xeixas, this session explores lesser-known territories of 20^th-century warfare, such as the victims’ history, but also the experience of soldiers when killing on the battlefield or killing civilians, or how war-related events shape different national historical memories and different public uses of the past.

• Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, author of An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare
• Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Santiago de Compostela, author of Sites of Dictators: Memories of Authoritarian Europe and Volver a Stalingrado (Returning to Stalingrad)
• Aurora Bosch, Professor, Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Valencia