War and the Mind

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Is war an inevitable and unavoidable part of human nature? What is the relation between mobilization for war and psychological manipulation? How have technologies of warfare built on understandings of the human mind? Those are some of the questions asked by War and the Mind, an absorbing and provocative exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum.

Khaki-coloured padded body protector in the shape of a nappy, with plastic buckles that clip at each side. — © IWM (EQU 15029) Pelvic protection body armour used in Afghanistan. On display in War and the Mind at IWM London (27 September 2024 – 27 April 2025).

This episode features a discussion between the exhibition’s curator Laura Clouting and Michael Roper and Shaul Bar-Haim, two historians who visited the exhibition and were intrigued and surprised by the story it has to tell. Their conversation explores the contents of the exhibition, the narrative that gives it shape, and the challenge of curating an exhibition on war and psychology in an unstable and conflict-filled world.

Two metal tags on a string, one imprinted with the words "2 LIEUT HANTS T EGT CE MSMCC[illegible]" — © IWM (EQU 3904) Identity Discs, on display in War and the Mind at IWM London (27 September 2024 – 27 April 2025).

Michael Roper

Professor Michael Roper is a social and cultural historian of twentieth-century Britain and Australia, based in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. His research spans the fields of war, subjectivity, personal testimony and psychoanalysis. His study of family legacies of the First World War in Australia, Britain, and Germany. Afterlives of War. A Descendants’ History was published by Manchester University Press in 2023, and he is the author of The Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009). He is currently researching the history of the tape recorder and its role in facilitating new forms of empathetic listening in the 1960s and 70s.

Shaul Bar-Haim

Shaul Bar-Haim is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His research covers a range of areas in the history of the human sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of trauma and emotion studies. Shaul is the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and co-editor of Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2021).

Laura Clouting

Laura Clouting is a Senior Curator Historian at Imperial War Museums, where she has worked since 2006. She is the lead curator for IWM London’s latest temporary exhibition War and the Mind. Laura has worked on high profile exhibitions at IWM, including the award-winning First World War Galleries, Lest We Forget? at IWM North, and Real to Reel: A Century of War Movies at IWM London. Laura is the author of IWM publication A Century of Remembrance. She is a regular spokesperson for IWM.

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