On April 22, during the lecture-meets-documentary-film event Post-War Journalism: Telling Stories After the Guns Fall Silent, Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentarian Anne Poiret set out to answer — and illustrate, using powerful video and film clips — a critical yet often overlooked question that follows armed conflicts: What happens when the war is “over”?
The event concluded the three-part series Human Rights and Humanitarianism in Contemporary Conflict, hosted by Barnard’s Office of the Provost to help the College community grasp the complexities and challenges of upholding human rights and enforcing international law during conflicts.
“I’m delighted that we were able to collaborate with departments and programs across Barnard and Columbia to host this series,” said Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty. “More than ever, we need genuine conversation, shared expertise, and opportunities to create new ideas together. The series has also given our students models of how to use their liberal arts education beyond our gates — Anne Poiret, like the other women leaders we’ve hosted, is an exemplar of the kind of thinker in the public sphere we hope our students will become.”
With more than a decade of field reporting from Iraq, South Sudan, and other countries, Poiret told the audience how journalists must document post-war realities — from searching for the missing and reconstructing after destruction to the long road traveled in search of collective healing.
“Everywhere I’ve gone on the front lines of peace — to Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sudan, Mali, ex-Yugoslavia, Namibia — I discovered the same universal, deeply human questions that are too rarely covered,” said Poiret. “How do people rebuild? How do they learn to live together again? How to disarm fighters who know nothing but war? How to work through memory, sometimes decades after?”
The post-lecture discussion was moderated by Séverine Autesserre, Barnard’s Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Political Science and a renowned expert in international relations and African studies. In her introductory remarks, Autessere touched on the impact of Poiret’s work and said, “She tells the kind of stories that are easy to ignore if you live far away but impossible to forget once you’ve heard them.”
Poiret also introduced After War, a multimedia initiative she founded in 2023 that aims to break down the media’s indifference toward these post-conflict periods as well as foster greater collaboration with journalists and fixers in affected countries and researchers specializing in these issues.
The series — co-sponsored by Columbia’s Alliance Program, the Columbia Journalism School, and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies — brought together Barnard’s illustrious interdisciplinary faculty with global practitioners from across disciplines. The previous two events were Climate Change, Race, and Migration, with Carmen Gonzalez, Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and Education Under Occupation in Ukraine, with Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch.
Read highlights from Poiret’s talk below, edited for length and clarity.
After the War Ends
In 2016, I met the deputy mayor of Mosul. He was counting garbage trucks recaptured as the army advanced, because he knew he would need them to restart his city. He would have to manage Iraq’s second-largest city, which had been cut off from the rest of the country for three years. He would have to restore electricity, running water, get civil servants back to work without including anyone affiliated with ISIS. And above all, [the country] would have to rebuild. I went back a year later to start filming. The result is a film called Mosul After the War.
Sometimes, “post war” means building a state. Sometimes, after a war, countries are created from scratch, usually with help from the United Nations. When you focus on post-war issues, you naturally turn to the U.N. It’s the institution where peacekeeping, peace-building, state-building, and even nation-building are conceptualized. In 2011, after decades of civil war against Khartoum [the capital of Sudan], the South decided it had enough, and a brand-new nation was created from the peace deal with South Sudan.
Post-War Matters
[It] matters to us because sometimes, like in South Sudan, post-wars are pre-wars. I was shooting in Libya in 2013, two years after the fall of [Moammar Gadhafi], and it was obvious the election would be a disaster. There were almost no reporters left to tell the story. In Iraq, when I filmed my latest documentary, Iraq, Land of Factions — which tells the story of the Shia militias who took up arms in 2014 after a fatwa to fight ISIS — it was clear in 2017, at the end of the war against ISIS, that the failure to disarm Shia militia would leave the country suspended above another regional war.
There’s one thing I’ve learned: When a war is over, it doesn’t mean peace. That is not the reality. Most of the time the conflict has just changed form. The violence has become more invisible, more insidious, and that absolutely needs to be reported because paying attention to the aftermath means recognizing the early signs of reescalation and, maybe, being able to anticipate what comes next.
After War Focus
One year ago, I founded a production house called After War, with a mission to improve the way the media reports on post-war realities. People who are interested in post conflict stories know how easy it is to start a war and how much harder it is to disarm combatants.
After War developed a project with researchers who specialize in post-conflict societies. We launched an Instagram series in partnership with CFJ Paris, the leading French journalism school. It’s called After War Focus, and it’s dedicated to post-war issues. We are also curating a collection of books, publishing January 2026, that will feature powerful, sensitive narratives by scholars with deep field experience in places like ex-Yugolsavia, Northern Ireland, and Colombia. They’ll share what they’ve seen and learned on the ground for many years, giving voice to those who are rebuilding, learning to live alongside their former enemies, and seeking justice.
—PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF TARA TERRANOVA ’25