War and Peace: Stanford Edition
Table of Contents
Authors' Note
Hello all, and welcome to our website! This is a collaboration of three Stanford freshman and their ideas and skills: Annie, primarily with audio editing and interviewing; Justin, primarily with website design and audio transcribing; and Faith, primarily with interviewing and writing content.
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War and Peace: Stanford Edition speaks to our collective wonder and curiosity about the subject of war. Our missions are to explore war's intricacies and impacts on people and to answer key ethical and philosophical questions. Does war have a purpose? Does mankind need war or is it preventable? Is war intrinsically linked to human nature or is it a response to cultural conflicts?
Thus, this project seeks to understand it in a variety of contexts and from a variety of people, military and civilian, mandatory and volunteer, teacher and student.
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Here, you’ll hear audio snippets of sources using their own voices to tell their stories as well as stories composed about the experiences they’ve had:
-You’ll know how it’s like to join a mandatory military service in Singapore from Seah Ying Hang, and how fighting an invisible enemy takes its toll.
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-And then you’ll hear from professor Ian Morris, who compares war’s prevalence throughout modern times and how violence is intrinsic to humans.
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-You’ll experience a little of what Lee Alpert did as a combat medic in Israel near the Syrian border and how she experienced humans at the peak of their vulnerability.
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-Next, Professor Gordon Chang talks about what it means to be an enemy in war today and why humans who take pride in valuing life need war.
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-Student Muskan Shafat tells us about growing up and living in Kashmir, a conflict-torn area and how her experiences have fueled her passion for world politics and conflict resolution.
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-You’ll hear that war is necessary and the different ways to make war effective from a historian and Hoover Fellow Bertrand Patenaude.
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-Finally, Joshua Stanley, a veteran with two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, will share his perspective on war, conflict, and his experiences.
We hope you’ll learn something and gain a new, more comprehensive picture of what war and conflict mean in today’s society, as well as their impact on the humans who live, grow up, serve, and fight in these trying times.
Ying Hang was sent to Taiwan to fight in the national army as part of Singaporean military duty. Despite being deemed not physically fit to do service, Ying Hang underwent rigorous training. Throughout his service, he sought to find meaning in war.
Ian Morris, Ph.D., is Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford University. Throughout his lifetime, he has found war to be an inextricable part of the human storyline. He believes that violence is embedded in human biology, but the development of larger nation-states and nuclear weapons has curbed that tendency in the 21st century.
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Lee Alpert worked as a medic in the Israeli army for the past two years. Treating trauma patients in the heat of war, Alpert sought to help people at their most vulnerable, all the while learning more about the horrors associated with warfare.
Gordon Chang is a professor of American History at Stanford University. He believes that the destruction of other people is part of the construction of our identities. With Professor Chang, we discussed the definition of an enemy in the modern world.
Muskan Shafat lived in India within Kashmir, a war-infested region with existing border disputes between Pakistan and India. She highlights her experiences and how she managed to cultivate a passion for effecting change despite her circumstances.
Bertrand Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution Lecturer in History and International Relations at Stanford University. According to Patenaude, the motivations for war can be questionable, but he finds that at some points it is necessary to go to war. Ultimately, Patenaude believes that war should not be intended to destroy, but to build something better than it was.
"We had to keep ourselves awake, and we come up with all sorts of crazy ways to do so whether it’s smoking (which is discouraged) or energy drinks or dancing in place, and we were so tired and we both had such goofy senses of humor that we just started wondering aloud how Arnold Schwarzenegger would have sounded as a singer."
Joshua Stanley, a recent Stanford graduate served two year-long deployments in four years to Iraq and Afghanistan. He discusses his direct experience with war and its impact on his future as well as the importance of small, happy memories.