World wars and forgotten civilians
Wars are often narrated through military strategies, political alliances, and battle dates. But what happens when we shift our gaze from the armed fronts to the destroyed homes, the displaced civilians, the invisible victims?
On Tuesday, May 6, the Bocconi Dondena Centre hosts The Civilian Victims of War panel discussion to look, eighty years after the end of World War II, at the price paid by those who suffered the war without ever fighting. Special guest speaker will be Cormac O'Grada, professor emeritus at University College Dublin, an internationally renowned economist and historian who has long been engaged in the study of the long-term effects of wars, famines and demographic shocks.
In his recent volume The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars, O'Grada presents a comparative analysis, based on quantitative data and little-explored historical sources, of civilian casualties during the two world wars. The author breaks with the war-front-centered narrative to concentrate on the war's consequences back home: leveled cities, starvation, disease, mass displacement, and systematic persecution. Not only in Europe, but on a global scale.
O'Grada will debate with Alessio Fornasin (University of Udine) and Tamás Vonyó (Bocconi), two scholars who have researched history and demography of conflicts. Letizia Mencarini will be the moderator. The event will be introduced by Guido Alfani, director of the Dondena Centre, who notes, “Eighty years on, it is time to restore the central role of the forgotten histories of civilians. Without them, the memory of conflicts remains incomplete.”
May 6, 2025, 3PM to 5PM, Room 41, Bocconi University
The event will be streamed via Zoom ID: 963 7694 5455 / Passcode: 552975
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