WARFUN Podcast

In this episode, Heidi Mogstad speaks with cultural anthropologist Eva van Roekel about her unconventional research on war perpetrators in Argentina — individuals indicted for crimes against humanity during the so-called Dirty War (1974–1983). The two anthropologists discuss the ethical and methodological challenges of studying soldiers who have committed acts of violence and atrocity, and how eng...

In this episode, Eva Johais discusses with Christopher Browning and James Brassett what a focus on humour reveals about international politics. With (international) politics increasingly becoming a site of ‘comedification’, they make compelling arguments why humour should be taken seriously. Be it its function as a mechanism of anxiety management, a tool of both governance and resistance, or its r...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Gal Kirn talk about the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle. Discussing the Partisan art created during the war, especially on the territory of Slovenia, they consider how wartime art production supported the resistance to fascism and complemented it as well as what its values are relevant today and how it could remain relevant in the future.   Gal Kirn holds a P...

In this episode, Heidi Mogstad and Thomas Randrup Pedersen discuss anthropological attitudes to research on the military and some of the ethical and methodological complexities of studying and writing about soldiers and warfare. Pedersen shares experiences from his fieldwork with combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and reflects on his turn to existential anthropology. Mogstad and Pedersen also d...

This episode first traces how public perceptions of soldiers have changed over time, including the recent reappraisal of the status of the armed forces in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The episode also sheds light on how soldiers experience civil-military relations. Against this background, the conversation revolves around German society’s relation to war. The conversation then digs in...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Petra Hamer talk about musicking in the besieged Sarajevo. The conversation covers many related aspects, from practical issues arising from the lack of electricity to the activities of musicians who stayed and those who fled as well as music-related activities of the soldiers. Petra talks about the omnipresence of music in the city and the reasons why it was comple...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Florian Bieber talk about the El Shatt refugee camp in Egypt that operated during the final two years of World War II. The conversation provides an overview of the functioning of this camp, the life of the people in it, and the aspects that made it a well-organized as well as a joyful establishment, which was different from other refugee camps. You can see images f...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Elissa Mailänder talk about Elissa's research of soldier amateur photography, particularly during the Second World War. The focus of their conversation is what can be discovered about soldiers and the ways they had fun through these seemingly banal tokens of war. Elissa Mailänder is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences Po in Paris. She is an...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Emma Hanna talk about wartime entertainment and recreation in the British Armed Forces during the First World War. The focus of the conversation is on the relevance of musical activities to rank-and-file soldiers and their impact on soldiers’ morale and well-being. Emma Hanna is a lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Kent in Great Britain. On rel...

In this episode, Blasco Sciarrino presents the Italian elite army corps known as the Daring Ones (Arditi), which fought mainly in the First World War. He discusses how having fun increased their fighting power in the course of war and their subsequent paramilitary activism, and considers if the playfulness and collective pursuits increased not just the Daring Ones’ military prowess, but also sever...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Jana Dolečki discuss theatre in the context of the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Wars. The conversation focuses on the theatrical performances of the so-called frontline theaters and in the theaters outside war zones (in Zagreb and Belgrade). In the second part of the conversation, they consider some more general claims about theatre and i...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Sven Milekić talk about the activities of Croatian veterans of the 1990s conflict active in veterans’ associations. The conversation focuses on the veterans' strategies of self-presentation to the public and instances where the observer can glimpse pleasure despite their emphasis on severity and sacrifice. Sven Milekić is a Doctoral candidate enrolled in the Ph...

In this episode, Heidi Mogstad talks to Jethro Norman about his ethnographic research with European veterans working and living as private military and security contractors in East Africa. Jethro argues for the importance of taking seriously the voices and experiences of veterans and ‘mercenaries’, including their attachments to and critiques of their own societies, the military, and national and...

In this episode, Iva Jelušić and Meredith Lair talk about the life of the US soldiers in army bases during the Vietnam War. The conversation first focuses on some of the findings from Lair’s book Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (2011), which examines the non-combat experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam. The second part of the conversation brings to the for...

In this episode, Eva Johais and Catherine Lutz discuss whether we can and should study fun in the context of war. This means dealing with moral and conceptual questions of conducting research on war. Why does Catherine Lutz call for “decentering the battlefield”? How can our own moralities inhibit our understanding of war as a central phenomenon in the contemporary world? And what forms of pleasur...