War leaves traces not only in landscapes, soil, water, infrastructure, and health. It also leaves traces in people, families, communities, documents, places, and collective memory.
Some consequences can be measured directly. Others can only be understood if experiences, memories, records, and historical evidence are preserved and connected.
The Human Experience of War is a separate conference direction dedicated to these human and historical dimensions of war.
It does not replace the environmental and scientific sections of the conference. Research on soil contamination, freshwater systems, environmental exposure, public health, and ecological consequences of war remains a distinct scientific programme.
The Human Experience of War section addresses a different but complementary question:How is the experience of war remembered, preserved, transmitted, documented, and interpreted over time?
From lived experience to historical memory
Human experience exists in different forms depending on how much time has passed since a war.
For recent and contemporary conflicts, experience may still be carried directly by veterans, civilians, medical workers, families, displaced people, emergency responders, deminers, local communities, and others whose lives were shaped by war.
As generations pass, this experience changes form.
It may survive through family memories, letters, diaries, photographs, oral histories, military and civilian archives, cemeteries, memorials, museums, battlefield landscapes, historical societies, commemorative organizations, and local traditions.
The conference is interested in this entire continuum:
living memory → family and community memory → documented memory → institutional memory → historical memory
The disappearance of the last eyewitness does not mean that the human experience of a war disappears completely. It means that responsibility for preserving and interpreting that experience passes increasingly to families, archives, museums, researchers, historical societies, memorial organizations, and communities.
Why human experience mattersOfficial records are essential, but no archive preserves everything.
Military records, medical documents, maps, environmental measurements, photographs, administrative files, personal correspondence, family histories, monuments, and local traditions each preserve different parts of the past.
Human testimony may reveal information that was never formally recorded.
Historical archives may preserve evidence long after direct witnesses have disappeared.
Memorial landscapes may show how societies chose to remember — or sometimes to forget — particular wars and particular groups of people.
The purpose of this direction is not to treat memory as automatic proof.
Memory, documents, archives, material evidence, and historical interpretation must all be examined critically.
But experiences and memories may contain questions worth preserving, comparing, and investigating.
Who carries and preserves the experience of war
No single group represents the whole experience of war.
Relevant perspectives may come from:● veterans and military families;● civilians and displaced communities;● children and descendants of people affected by war;● medical workers, caregivers, emergency responders, and deminers;● researchers and oral-history projects;● archives, libraries, museums, and memorial institutions;● historical and military-historical societies;● battlefield preservation organizations;● cemeteries and commemorative institutions;● local communities connected with former battlefields and war landscapes;● and organizations preserving the memory of wars from earlier centuries.
Different people and different societies may remember the same war differently.
Former opponents may preserve different national narratives. Families may remember events differently from governments. Local communities may preserve experiences that are absent from national histories.
These differences are not obstacles to the project.
They are part of the historical record.
Not one war and not one national perspective
Human Experience of War is not connected to one conflict, one country, one military alliance, or one generation.
The Vietnam War is relevant.
The World Wars are relevant.
Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere are relevant.
So are conflicts whose living witnesses disappeared long ago: the Napoleonic Wars, nineteenth-century wars, and other historical conflicts whose human consequences now survive primarily through archives, memorials, museums, cemeteries, historical landscapes, and organized remembrance.The purpose is not to suggest that different wars are equivalent.
Every war has its own political context, geography, causes, actors, scale, and consequences.
We do not compare wars as if they were the same. We examine how societies preserve and interpret the human experience left by different wars.
Preserving what may otherwise disappear
Human experience is fragile.
People die.
Memories disappear.
Documents are lost.
Families move.
Languages change.
Institutions collapse.
Cemeteries deteriorate.
Battlefields are rebuilt or transformed.
Archives remain uncatalogued.
Some experiences are never recorded because nobody asked.
Historical preservation therefore matters not only for understanding the past.
It may also help future researchers reconstruct health effects, environmental exposure, displacement, social disruption, everyday life, and other long-term consequences of war.
A shared international question
Across very different historical periods, one question remains:
What should be preserved today so that future generations can understand what war meant for the people and communities who experienced it?
For a contemporary conflict, this may mean recording testimony.
For a war fifty years ago, it may mean preserving veterans’ and family memories.
For a war two hundred years ago, it may mean protecting archives, cemeteries, monuments, battlefield landscapes, and the historical communities that preserve knowledge about them.
The forms change.
The responsibility to preserve the human record remains.
A simple principleWar leaves traces in soil.War leaves traces in water.War leaves traces in people.
And long after the people themselves are gone, traces of their experience may remain in families, documents, landscapes, cemeteries, memorials, museums, and collective memory.
Some traces can be measured.
Others must first be remembered, preserved, connected, and understood.