AGORA: The Role of History in War and Peace

Erkki Tuomioja examines the role of history and historians as both instigators of war and how they can be used to prevent and defuse conflict.

Although it is mostly politicians and sometimes the media who abuse history to justify and make war, nothing a priori excludes the possibility that historians too can lend their knowledge and expertise to abusive purposes. This is why it is extremely important to engage in dialogue with all historians as researches with the aim of encouraging and supporting the possibilities for independent and critical historical research transcending borders, so that historians could also be contributors to conflict prevention and resolution.

The first step in any attempts to remove history as a source of conflict is to get historians from both sides to sit down together and listen to each other’s narrative of their historical relations. This does not entail accepting all narratives and they can be contested, but awareness and recognition of these narratives is always the first step towards removing history as a source of conflict.

This describes the idea behind Historians without Borders. Our organisation has, i.a., managed twice before Russia´s full scale attack against Ukraine to bring together Ukrainian and Russian historians in Helsinki in closed seminars.

Russia is not the sole perpetrator engaging in the misuse of history for twisted ends, even if it is certainly the most notorious and dangerous one.

To deal openly and honestly with a country’s history is never easy. Each country has a strong built-in propensity to look at its own history from a very nationalistic viewpoint. This is where it is vital that historians look at and study history also with historians from other countries and particularly with those from their neighboring countries.

Erkki Tuomioja (b. 1946) is Ph.D. and Docent in Political History at the University of Helsinki and author of over 25 books on history, politics and current affairs. He has been Member of Parliament for over 40 years and is the longest serving Minister for Foreign Affairs in Finland. He is also chairman of Historians without Borders in Finland and the international network of Historians without Borders for which the Finnish NGO acts as the secretariat. He has also been member of the Finnish Olympic Committee and remains and active participant in the Finnish Peace Movement.