OPEN WORKSHOP
Intention
May We, as a Species, Realize that War is Not Natural.
War Kills: It Is a Collective Dis/Ease.
Let Us Work Together to Heal, Transform, and Co-Create a World of Mutual Flourishing.
May All Beings Be Safe from Inner and Outer War:
Together We Thrive.
War Kills: It Is a Collective Dis/Ease.
Let Us Work Together to Heal, Transform, and Co-Create a World of Mutual Flourishing.
May All Beings Be Safe from Inner and Outer War:
Together We Thrive.
Introduction
As we step into 2026, we wish for a year of clarity, care, and attention to the fragile interdependencies that bind human and more-than-human worlds. This year, we turn our focus to war as a dis/ease—its impacts on bodies, societies, and the planet, and the many ways we might imagine healing it. Seen this way, war is not a solution to conflict but a pathology of human systems. At the core of this dis/ease lies the belief that killing the ‘other’ will bring resolution; history shows the opposite—violence does not end problems but carries them forward, resurfacing across generations through cycles of harm and intergenerational trauma. External conflicts mirror our internal struggles: no one who is at peace with themselves can truly engage in war. The inner and the outer are intertwined, each shaping and sustaining the other.
Context
In times of uncertainty and conflict, the Global Posthuman Network, in collaboration with the Posthuman Academy, reaffirms its commitment to dignity, ethical co-existence, and peace, exploring posthumanist tools for compassion, responsibility, and relational care. We are a glocal community, sustained by dialogue, creativity, and the pluralistic work of imagining horizons of mutual flourishing across differences. This ongoing workshop "Treating the Dis/Ease of War: Cultivating Posthuman Coexistence" situates the topic “Making Self; Making World,” first developed at our Second International Existential Posthumanism Conference (India, 2026), as an entangled Existential Posthumanist practice in which healing, self-cultivation, and world-making unfold together. Conceived as an open and evolving workshop, it invites participants from all backgrounds to bring its questions and practices into their universities, communities, and local contexts. Reflections and outcomes from these distributed iterations will be collectively gathered and shared as a living archive on the GPN, extending the workshop beyond a single site or moment.
Thought Experiment
At the heart of the workshop is a thought experiment. Participants are invited to consider war not as an inevitability, but as a collective dis/ease of the human species, starting from these questions:
What if… we consider war as a disease? Since war kills, what would it mean to treat it as a pathology that emerged roughly 5,000 years ago, compared with more than 150,000 years of human existence?
Workshop Facilitation Guide
After presented with the thought experiment explained above, participants are guided to envision concrete ways of healing this dis/ease, exploring questions such as:
After an initial plenary session in which the notion of war as a dis/ease is introduced, participants are invited into a reflective moment grounded in the collective reading of a shared document. Following this, participants are divided into small groups for an approximately 30-minute circle sharing. The groups then reconvene in plenary, where one spokesperson from each group briefly shares the visions, reflections, or insights that emerged during the discussion. The process concludes with a final collective circle, during which each participant contributes a single word. These words come together to form a shared narrative, remaining as a collective, co-constructed, figurative possibility and an embodied expression of posthuman coexistence.
Flow
This workshop is designed to be flexible and transportable: participants can bring it to a variety of audiences—classrooms, community groups, interdisciplinary gatherings, or other networks. Through discussion, mapping, speculative scenarios, and embodied reflection, the workshop becomes a collaborative space for imagining practical, ethical, and relational strategies to address the dis/ease of war across human and more-than-human relations, opening a space to explore how individual, social, and ecological transformation are interconnected, and how cultivating posthuman co-existence is both a personal and collective project. These phases provide a flexible structure for the workshop, allowing facilitators to adjust the duration and flow of each activity depending on the audience, setting, or available time:
As we step into 2026, we wish for a year of clarity, care, and attention to the fragile interdependencies that bind human and more-than-human worlds. This year, we turn our focus to war as a dis/ease—its impacts on bodies, societies, and the planet, and the many ways we might imagine healing it. Seen this way, war is not a solution to conflict but a pathology of human systems. At the core of this dis/ease lies the belief that killing the ‘other’ will bring resolution; history shows the opposite—violence does not end problems but carries them forward, resurfacing across generations through cycles of harm and intergenerational trauma. External conflicts mirror our internal struggles: no one who is at peace with themselves can truly engage in war. The inner and the outer are intertwined, each shaping and sustaining the other.
Context
In times of uncertainty and conflict, the Global Posthuman Network, in collaboration with the Posthuman Academy, reaffirms its commitment to dignity, ethical co-existence, and peace, exploring posthumanist tools for compassion, responsibility, and relational care. We are a glocal community, sustained by dialogue, creativity, and the pluralistic work of imagining horizons of mutual flourishing across differences. This ongoing workshop "Treating the Dis/Ease of War: Cultivating Posthuman Coexistence" situates the topic “Making Self; Making World,” first developed at our Second International Existential Posthumanism Conference (India, 2026), as an entangled Existential Posthumanist practice in which healing, self-cultivation, and world-making unfold together. Conceived as an open and evolving workshop, it invites participants from all backgrounds to bring its questions and practices into their universities, communities, and local contexts. Reflections and outcomes from these distributed iterations will be collectively gathered and shared as a living archive on the GPN, extending the workshop beyond a single site or moment.
Thought Experiment
At the heart of the workshop is a thought experiment. Participants are invited to consider war not as an inevitability, but as a collective dis/ease of the human species, starting from these questions:
What if… we consider war as a disease? Since war kills, what would it mean to treat it as a pathology that emerged roughly 5,000 years ago, compared with more than 150,000 years of human existence?
Workshop Facilitation Guide
After presented with the thought experiment explained above, participants are guided to envision concrete ways of healing this dis/ease, exploring questions such as:
- How might we diagnose war?
- How might we intervene?
- How might we unlearn its patterns?
After an initial plenary session in which the notion of war as a dis/ease is introduced, participants are invited into a reflective moment grounded in the collective reading of a shared document. Following this, participants are divided into small groups for an approximately 30-minute circle sharing. The groups then reconvene in plenary, where one spokesperson from each group briefly shares the visions, reflections, or insights that emerged during the discussion. The process concludes with a final collective circle, during which each participant contributes a single word. These words come together to form a shared narrative, remaining as a collective, co-constructed, figurative possibility and an embodied expression of posthuman coexistence.
Flow
This workshop is designed to be flexible and transportable: participants can bring it to a variety of audiences—classrooms, community groups, interdisciplinary gatherings, or other networks. Through discussion, mapping, speculative scenarios, and embodied reflection, the workshop becomes a collaborative space for imagining practical, ethical, and relational strategies to address the dis/ease of war across human and more-than-human relations, opening a space to explore how individual, social, and ecological transformation are interconnected, and how cultivating posthuman co-existence is both a personal and collective project. These phases provide a flexible structure for the workshop, allowing facilitators to adjust the duration and flow of each activity depending on the audience, setting, or available time:
- Welcoming and Plenary Introduction (10 min ca.): Introduction of the concept of war as a dis/ease.
- Collective Reflection (10 min ca.): Engage participants with a shared reading of a selected passage—whether from a book, poem, or other inspiring text on the topic—followed by opportunities for individual reflection and collective dialogue.
- Small Group Circle Sharing (35 min ca.): Participants break into small groups for approximately 30 minutes of circle dialogue.
- Plenary Sharing (20 min ca.): One speaker from each group briefly presents the group’s key visions or insights.
- Final Collective Circle (15 min ca.): Each participant shares one word, contributing to a pluralistic narrative that embodies a co-constructive, posthuman perspective on coexistence.
Example for Participants: Reframing History
One approach that can be offered to people working in education is to consider how these ideas might be applied in teaching, curriculum design, or classroom discussion, asking for instance:
What if we, as educators, didn’t simply list wars after wars as dates, battles, and outcomes, but instead paused to question how and why these narratives are told the way they are? What if we presented history in a different light—one that frames war as a form of collective dis/ease rather than an inevitable or neutral event?
One way to engage participants is to explore how history is written and taught. Let’s consider the case of the First and Second World Wars—not just the events themselves, but how they are typically framed, interpreted, and passed down in historical accounts. The aim is not to reduce these tragedies to numbers or statistics, but to reframe war as a collective pathology—something we can study, understand, and imagine ways to heal, just as we would a disease. This opens space for multiple approaches to healing, spanning from individual self-care to collective and societal transformation: the micro and macro are intertwined, each co-creating the other.
The following are offered as possible examples for presenting the World Wars: the first frames war as a historical inevitability, while the second approaches war as a form of dis/ease with enduring social, psychological, and ecological consequences.
1. The Normalization of the World Wars in History
In many conventional history textbooks and classrooms, the First and Second World Wars are often presented as inevitable milestones in a linear story of progress. They are organized chronologically, explained through causes and consequences, and framed as unavoidable conflicts that reshaped nations, borders, and global power.
For example, students may learn that:
- World War I was caused by alliances, nationalism, imperialism, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
- World War II followed as a consequence of unresolved tensions, economic collapse, and the rise of totalitarian regimes.
- These wars contributed to technological development, the founding of international institutions like the United Nations, and the emergence of new global orders.
- Treating mass violence as a routine mechanism of historical change
- Reducing human suffering to statistics, battle outcomes, or treaty dates
- Presenting war as something that “happens” rather than something produced by human choices and systems
2. The Reframing of the World Wars as a Collective Dis/ease
Now imagine presenting the same historical events through a different lens—not as inevitable conflicts, but as symptoms of a deeper global dis/ease. Instead of asking only why specific wars occurred, we might ask:
- What conditions allowed this dis/ease of war to take hold, spread, and persist across societies?
- How does the dis/ease of war manifest in bodies, minds, communities, and ecosystems over time?
- In what ways does it transmit itself across generations, leaving lingering social, psychological, and ecological scars?
To guide students or participants, one might frame the discussion as follows:
“In the 20th century, the First and Second World Wars can be understood as the cumulative results of a deep global dis/ease—an entrenched normalization of war as a means of resolving political, economic, and ideological conflict. Like pandemics, these wars spread across borders and populations, killing tens of millions directly through combat and countless others indirectly through displacement, starvation, and disease. The harm did not end when the fighting stopped: trauma carried itself forward across generations, transmitted through family histories, cultural memory, and embodied stress responses, as documented in studies on intergenerational trauma. The land, too, bears lasting scars. From devastated ecosystems to the long shadows of atomic bombings, the ecological and social consequences of this dis/ease remain visible today.”
The following examples highlight some of the enduring consequences of the dis/ease of war, approached from this perspective, though this list is by no means exhaustive:
- Psychological impacts persist across generations, as research on intergenerational and epigenetic trauma suggests.
- Social systems carry long-term scars, including militarization, nationalism, and normalized violence.
- Ecological damage remains visible today, from scarred landscapes and unexploded ordnance to radiation zones left by atomic warfare.
Why This Matters
The aim of this reframing is not to medicalize or depersonalize history, nor to deny agency or responsibility. Rather, it is to:
- Denaturalize war as an inevitable feature of human life
- Challenge narratives that present violence as acceptable or inevitable
- Open space to ask how societies might prevent and heal from war, as well as interrupt ongoing conflicts.
- Education that cultivates critical historical consciousness
- Policy that addresses structural inequality and militarization
- Community-based care for trauma and memory
- Ecological restoration of damaged lands
- Art, ritual, and embodied practices that help societies mourn and transform
Inputs
This paragraph from Ferrando's The Art of Being Posthuman (2024, pp. 155–156) may be read aloud or shared with participants to help contextualize the discussion and situate it within a posthuman framework that denaturalizes war, presenting it instead as a form of social dis/ease:
"Is war 'natural'? In his book The End of War, the science journalist John Horgan underlines that war is not “natural.” As he explains: 'Evidence of lethal group violence dates back not to the emergence of the Homo genus millions of years ago, nor to the emergence of our species hundreds of thousands of years ago, but to less than thirteen thousand years ago, shortly before the dawn of civilization' (2012: 10). In general, the Paleolithic and Neolithic times were peaceful periods in human interactions; Neolithic excavations around the world indicate, more generally, an egalitarian society with no strict social hierarchies. The practice of organized warfare and armed conflict emerged, more clearly, during the Bronze Age, approximately from 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE, with the rise of states and kingdoms, connected to borders and access to resources, in some parts of the world. War is quite a recent invention in human history. The repetition of the stereotype of war as innate to human behavior is not healthy: war kills. It should be addressed as a social dis-ease, to be healed and transformed collectively. Instead, it has been normalized and generalized. In presenting war as “natural,” in teaching history as a list of wars, in neutralizing and naturalizing war, scholastic education, cultural products and information technologies turn into major vectors of social dis-easing, reiterating the seeds of war, consistently and effectively, generation after generation."
Contacts
Are You proposing a workshop? Do You have results to share? Please write to us at [email protected] with the title “Dis/Ease of War.”
Facilitators
Francesca Ferrando and Stefano Rozzoni.
Sources
Buran, S. Ferrando, F. and Rozzoni, S. "A Multilogue on Post-Violence: Posthumanist Visions, Narratives and Entanglements" in: Álvares, C. / Bernardino, L. / Freitas, M. / Soeiro, R. G (Eds.) (2025) Entanglements and Intersections in a Posthuman World, Critical Posthumanism Series, Brill. (To access the free self-archived version of the article, click HERE).
Ferrando, F., The Art of Being Posthuman (2024), Polity: Cambridge, UK.
