Topic description and stories

How do we protect doctors, media and NGOs in war? - a time to discuss

18 Mar 2024

Dr Saleyha Ahsan explores why journalists and medics are now increasingly seen as targets in warzones and what can potentially be done to support...

Read more
Patient being treated in a Kharkiv hospital during a 2015 military operation

Opinion: The challenges faced by doctors and nurses in conflict zones

15 Mar 2022

Professor Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School outlines some of the unique pressures faced by doctors and nurses in Ukraine, in this...

Read more
England, Charles I (1625-49) lozenge-shaped silver shilling siege piece, 1648, Pontefract

Pop-up mints and coins made from prayers

04 Dec 2017

In the tumultuous upheaval of the English Civil War, Royalist castles under siege used ‘pop-up’ mints to make coins to pay their soldiers. A unique...

Read more

Opinion: Obama's Nobel-winning vision of 'world without nuclear weapons' is still distant

27 Oct 2016

Despite his best intentions, Barack Obama will leave office with his dream of nuclear disarmament seemingly just as distant as it was at the...

Read more
British Army Soldier in Afghanistan Engaging the Enemy

Opinion: How context makes conflict trauma hard to understand, and not just for Trump

07 Oct 2016

Mark de Rond (Cambridge Judge Business School) discusses how exposure to terrible events may only tell part of the complex story of post-traumatic...

Read more
Diana Carnegie with her husband James and her children Charlotte, Sue and Sophie

Stolen World War Two letters help author uncover the hidden lives of army wives

09 Sep 2016

A stolen chest of letters – penned by an army wife to her husband on the battlefields of the Second World War – has helped a Cambridge academic and...

Read more

Soldiers Patrolling in Afghanistan

Have we misunderstood post-traumatic stress disorder?

19 Aug 2016

In understanding war-related post-traumatic stress disorder, a person’s cultural and professional context is just as important as how they cope with...

Read more
Left: Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Gentleman with His Helmet on a Column, ca. 1555-56. Middle: Giovanni Battista Moroni, The Gentlemen in Pink, 1560, Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo. Right: Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Man, 1526,  Oil on canvas.

Arms and the man: how a culture of warfare shapes masculinity

31 Mar 2016

The trappings of violence were embedded into the culture of 16th century Europe. Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has...

Read more
Left: Skull of a man found lying prone in the lagoons sediments. The skull has multiple lesions consistent with wounds from a blunt implement. Right: The skull in situ.

Evidence of a prehistoric massacre extends the history of warfare

20 Jan 2016

Skeletal remains of a group of foragers massacred around 10,000 years ago on the shores of a lagoon is unique evidence of a violent encounter between...

Read more

Skull of a man with multiple lesions on the side, probably caused by a club.

Opinion: Finding a hunter-gatherer massacre scene that may change history of human warfare

19 Jan 2016

Marta Mirazon Lahr (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies) discusses the discovery, made by her and her team, of the oldest known case of...

Read more
Regaining of the Provincial city of Anqing

Portrait of a bloody siege

09 Mar 2014

The siege of Anqing in central China was a pivotal episode in a civil war that saw the loss of 20 million lives. At a talk on Tuesday (11 March, 2014...

Read more
Gassed by John Singer Sargent

The war that changed everything and nothing: a series of public talks

21 Jan 2014

To mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, the acclaimed historian and author Margaret MacMillan will give a series of public...

Read more

Pages