Hadas Zahavi
Hadas Zahavi is the Founding Director of Columbia University Global Center for Peace Innovation, leading its interdisciplinary lab, pedagogical hub, and contemporary art gallery. This center emerged as a continuation of her research, structured around the question: What does it mean to be “at peace” and “at war” in the ecopolitical realities of the 21st century, where peace itself is entangled in the very structures of war, through global arms economies, inherited trauma, and military pollution?
To answer this question, Zahavi maps how peace and war are imagined, aestheticized, and commodified across various cultural forms, from contemporary literature and amateur photography to advertising and tourist guides, exposing the emotional and visual infrastructures that normalize violence, while foregrounding the literary and artistic interventions that resist it.
She first developed this inquiry in her doctoral research at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle CNRS THALIM TAU (2019–2023), where she challenged the prevailing assumption that only those physically present in war can bear witness to it. In its place, she introduced the figure of the peaceless witness: those who, though absent from an active conflict zone, are nonetheless implicated in the mechanisms of war—living in societies that finance and legitimize conflict through the global arms trade and military interventions, while also bearing the psychological, political, and ecological consequences of past wars. Through contemporary Francophone literature written in the first person and present tense by third-generation authors of the First World War, her dissertation proposes a new model for articulating this form of testimony within a borderless vision of eco-political justice (published by Hermann under the title Comment témoigner d’une guerre qu’on n’a pas vécue).
During her Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton (2023–2024), Zahavi developed this model into a framework of literary resistance to both the structures of oppression that persist in postcolonial societies and contemporary situations of occupation. Focusing on literary alliances formed by second-generation authors from all 'sides' of the Algerian War, she traces how descendants mobilize personal memory, archival silences, and inherited responsibility to confront these intertwined legacies and their ongoing realities.
At Columbia’s Department of French, Zahavi is developing the foundations for her forthcoming project, which will investigate how peace itself has become a product of the very systems that generate war. Through the advertising histories of Michelin, Kodak, and Burberry, she constructs a non-binary history of peace and war, showing how leisure, mobility, and domestic imagery were used to market both pacified ideals and militarized goods, merging war and peace into a single logic of consumption that continues to shape the global economic-political order.
Through the Global Center for Peace Innovation, the question of how we inhabit peace and war in the 21st century becomes a generative force, shaping a transdisciplinary, cross-continental space where research, artistic practice, and pedagogy converge. As founding director, Zahavi brings together scholars from diverse fields to collectively develop new theoretical languages for thinking peace and war today; curates contemporary art that reimagines their visual and emotional grammar; and leads an educational initiative co-created with and for children that explores how peace and war can be taught, questioned, and experienced anew, toward a future grounded in justice, sustainability, and peace beyond borders.
Key Publications Related to Peace and War Studies:
Book:
"Comment témoigner d’une guerre que l’on n’a pas vécue ?", Hermann, 2025.
Articles:
“Peace in an Era of Global War(ming)”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Nature, Vol. 13, 2026.
“The Michelin Guides to the Battlefields of the First World War: The Destruction of War as a Tourist Attraction”, French Studies (Oxford Academic), Vol. 76, No. 2, 2022.
“Peace in Every Shot: How Kodak Changed the Way We See War”, Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press), 2025.
“Peace: An Extreme Situation?”, Genre (California State University), Vol. 40, 2024.
“Toward a Literary Genre of 'Neither Peace nor War’”, European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 11, 2022.
“Pourquoi la guerre semble-t-elle si amusante dans notre album familial ?”, Mémoires en Jeu, No. 21, 2024.
“Le Front de la Première Guerre Mondiale Comme Parc d'Attraction Touristique”, Mémoires en Jeu, Vol. 18, 2024.
“Le Témoin Amnésique”, in Culture de la Mémoire et Poétique de l’Oubli (L’Harmattan), 2025.
Paixguerrisme, in Représenter et penser la paix (artshebdomedias), 2026.