Call for Essays: The Concept of War

PEACE REVIEW: A JOURNAL OF SOCIAL JUSTICE is an international journal
distributed in more than 50 nations. We seek essays on the above theme
for a special issue.

Has our understanding of the phenomenon of war changed of recent?
Should we attempt to explore new ways of conceptualizing, theorizing,
and synthesizing? Evidently, certain discontinuities mark the era that
has followed the end of the Cold War. So-called humanitarian
interventions have been multiplying; the considerable widening of the
concept of security gave rise to the dissemination of the notion of
war, which now embraces as heterogeneous discourse fields as
preemptive war, terrorism, war on drugs, wars of civilizations, and
post-national war, to mention just a few; furthermore, the ruptures
are manifest in the Western world's novel military technology, which
has spurred the professionalization of the military and - as a
corollary - the fading away of the republican ideal of the soldier-
citizen, whereas mass war is still prevailing in the Third World; the
unipolar and hegemonic world order seems to facilitate the emergence
of new armed conflicts; the spreading and putting into practice of the
neo-liberal ideology has caused the partial privatization of war,
stretching from subcontracting of non-combatant tasks by private firms
to the "new mercenaries" and introducing a new articulation of the
relationship among public power, political legitimacy, and (material
and human) cost externalization. At the same time, in the periphery
of the world system, neo-patrimonialism and clientilism are
increasingly gaining ground through the violent rent seeking
appropriations by warlords and local militias (in the gold or
diamond mines, narcotics, etc.); wars linked to ethnic or religious
identities are burgeoning; the proliferation of peace keeping missions
leads to the "gendering" of the military; the nuclear strategies,
which have been predominant during the Cold War, appear to have been
relegated to second stage.

Notwithstanding, not all aspects are completely new. The total number
of armed conflicts has stayed roughly stable (forty simultaneously) -
the immense majority comprising of intra-national (civil) war or of
armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor. Inter-national
war, the frame of reference of political philosophy, public
international law, and political theory of international relations,
remain the exception. Likewise, the influence of the military-
industrial complex has certainly not diminished, and imperialist wars
did not disappear.

Challenged by the new complexity of the phenomenon of war, some
theoretical approaches, considered to be mono-causal, have been
outmoded, e.g. Malthusian inspired theories - for example the
polémologie - which confound (demographic) cause and effect. Other
theories, such as just war ethics, game theory, and Clausewitzan and
Aronian driven approaches, which had been very popular a few years
ago, seem to suffer from fatigue and failure to renew. The legal
utopias promising to regulate organized violence by means of the rule
of law and the progressive criminalization of war are no longer
unanimously shared. At present, the traditional philosophy of war
appears increasingly incapable of comprehending the new realities.
Filling the void and mark the contemporary debate are constructivist
theorizings, postmodern and feminist deconstructions, some neo-
Gramscian approaches or the combination of post-modernism with neo-
Marxism, as well as the grand (and worrisome) return of the Schmittan
(friend-foe) dichotomies.

The main objective of this issue is not just to chronicle the
situation and bring out new streams of reflection within the three
disciplines of political science, philosophy, and law. More
importantly, the ultimate goal is to compare the disciplinary
perspectives, and, to the extent possible, "crossbreed" them. Faced
with the considerable impending challenges of the phenomenon of war,
disciplinary compartmentalization proves, indeed, unproductive.

Please send essays on this theme by January 15, 2007. Essays should
run between 2500 and 3500 words, and should be jargon- and footnote-
free. See Submission Guidelines at
http://www.usfca.edu/peacereview/PRHome.html.

Send essays to:
Robert Elias (Editor) or Kerry Donoghue (Managing Editor)
Peace Review
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, CA 94117-1080
USA

or by email:
peacereview@usfca.edu

Sincerely,
Kerry Donoghue
Managing Editor, Peace Review
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, CA 94117-1080
Phone: 415-422-2910
Email: peacereview@usfca.edu
http://www.usfca.edu/peacereview/PRHome.html