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WARKETING PEACE

Project description

Reinventing how we view peace in the 21st century

Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WARKETING PEACE project contends that peace has become a branded commodity, manufactured and marketed by those who profit from war. In this context, it exposes how brands such as Michelin, Kodak and Burberry established a modern concept of peace in the late 1800s, defining it through consumer leisure and tourism, rather than justice. During World War I, the same products were adapted for combat use and marketed as tools to experience peace amid war. The project examines how corporate branding, consumer behaviour and media narratives shape a non-binary history of peace and war, providing a new model for the cultural economy of peace.

Objective

“Peace,” this project argues, is no longer a state we inhabit but a commodity—branded, packaged, and sold by those who profit from war. Warketing Peace reveals how three iconic brands, Michelin, Kodak, and Burberry, invented by the late 1800s the ideal of a “peaceful lifestyle,” where peace was framed not as the result of justice, but of consuming leisure and tourism. With WWI, this fantasy was redirected: their products were simultaneously adapted for military use and promoted as ways to experience peace amid war. In the postwar era, three strands—romanticized peace, aestheticized war, and infrastructures of violence—merged into a single logic of consumption. This commodification has since consolidated into today’s global order, where “peaceful” nations profit from peace-images while driving militarized economies, underscoring the urgency of rethinking what it means to be at peace in the 21st century. At the crossroads of peace studies, narratology, media history, and ecopolitics, Warketing Peace undertakes a diachronic comparative reading of corporate marketing and consumer archives to pioneer a non-binary history of peace and war, offering a new model for analysing and mapping peace’s cultural economy. While Warketing Peace reconstructs the consumer history of modern peace, my MSCA collaborative strand, The Memorial for Those Who Did Not Fall in War (MNW), offers an innovative platform of interdisciplinary research, art, and pedagogy to co-create alternative, cross-border languages for a future of peace and ecological justice. Culminating in a monograph, an article, conference presentations, and three MNW events across Europe, my MSCA fellowship at VUB, with a secondment at Columbia, extends my previous research on peace identities (PhD at Sorbonne Nouvelle, Fulbright postdoc at Princeton, and directorship of Columbia University’s Global Center for Peace Innovation), to revolutionise how we imagine and create peace in the 21st century.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF

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Coordinator

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 200 400,00
Address
PLEINLAAN 2
1050 BRUSSEL
Belgium

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Region
Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/ Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Arr. de Bruxelles-Capitale/Arr. Brussel-Hoofdstad
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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