Fighting for Peace
BSA Early Career Fellow 2017-8 Dr Eirini Karamouzi devoted part of her time in Athens as a scientific curator for an exhibition entitled ‘Fighting for Peace in the 1980s: Greece-Italy-Spain’, organised by the Hellenic Parliament Foundation. The exhibition opens on 15 November and runs until March 2019. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue and a series of educational programmes. Eirini has provided the following description:
The key objective of this exhibition is to shed light on anti-nuclear and anti-militarist peace protests in Southern European countries during the late 1970s and the 1980s. The focus will be on Greece, Italy and Spain. Following a period of détente in the 1970s, the worsening of relations between the two superpowers during the so called Second Cold war of the early 1980s and the deepening of the nuclear arms race, reinvigorated the anti-nuclear movement. During the nuclear crisis, people in Southern Europe like in the rest of the continent sought to re-evaluate their own past, present, and future. The societal response to arms deployment was an expression of rapid sociocultural and technological changes that started in the 1960s and continued with the transformations of the 1970s and 1980s. As activists united to oppose the dire nuclear threat, they engaged and responded to core concerns of safety, peace, democratic participation, mobilisation for disarmament and vitality of citizen engagement. The Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) acts as a reminder of the existential threat that nuclear weapons still pose to humanity and the value in harnessing the power of the people.
