Wars and violent conflicts are often studied through security frameworks that emphasize the geopolitical consequences of war, frequently reducing the human cost to mere statistics. As part of the educational project Missing and Found, eighteen students from the College of Ypres embark on a journey through Flanders Fields to portray the process of identifying missing persons from World War I and its impact on present-day Belgium. An estimated 600,000 people were killed in Belgium during the First World War, and tens of thousands remain missing to this day. Their continued absence and the ongoing search for them more than a century later reveal the deep wounds that wars inflict on people’s lives.
These conflicts leave thousands unaccounted for, still awaited by loved ones, even if they have never met. The work of archaeologists and investigators, often carried out with limited funding, emphasizes the importance of humanizing the victims, recovering their names, and, even when identification fails, providing a grave that commemorates the person, a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or a child whose life was taken by the decisions and demands of wars they did not create.
This documentary, prepared by the students from the College of Ypres, highlights the human cost of war and the lessons that must be learned. These lessons are not meant to improve strategies of war, but to eliminate it altogether. As Piet Chielens, the former coordinator of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, states, walking amidst the traces of war reveals the misery that conflicts have continually brought upon humanity in the past, present, and future. By focusing on this and foregrounding the human cost of war, and by staying critical and alert to societal changes, we can use history for the benefit of humanity.
If you let history inspire you in the right way, this will ensure that you remain alert, that you remain sensitive to the fact that new conflicts can present themselves again and again. – Piet Chielens
We invite you to discover the untold stories and powerful insights in this compelling documentary. It can be accessed through this link: https://youtu.be/_fkmK2mv3hI?feature=shared
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The educational project Missing and Found is an initiative of the In Flanders Fields Museum and College Ypres in cooperation with the Flemish Peace Institute, with financial support from Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed. The work of the students was supervised by Wouter Sinaeve, an associated researcher to our project, and our PI, Élise Féron, had the honor of being a consultant for the project.