State-Led Inquiries as Political Devices: Lessons Learned and Lost from British Interventions, 1853 to the Present Day

One-day virtual workshop hosted by the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict (CHVC) and the Leverhulme-funded Warnings from the Archive project at the University of Exeter. This workshop reflects a renewed interest in research into processes and politics of truth-telling and lesson-learning in the wake of state-sponsored violence, intervention, and transgression. The focus of the workshop will be on the political conditions and cultural norms that determine the composition and scope of inquiries and lesson-learning. Rather than treating inquiries as objective vessels of knowledge, we approach them as political devices. Our interests are in how contingent processes of investigation shape elite and popular understandings of the history and character of British military operations from the Crimean War to the present day. The outcome of this workshop will be a special issue with a top-tier interdisciplinary journal for History, Politics and International Relation