Special Issue on Feminist Perspectives on Peace and War

In this special issue we hope to reflect, learn and create spaces for discussions about peace and war, violence and non-violence, and about the persistent character of structural domination. The war in Ukraine adds to several other on-going violent aggressions and conflicts in other places in the world, like Palestine, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen. It is during such moments in contemporary politics that we require voices from a gender studies perspective both to understand and to make way for envisioning possibilities of solidarities in times of war and beyond.

Feminist scholars and activist have been exploring issues of peace, war and militarism from a variety of perspectives and with focus on different aspects. One of the key debates in this field of feminist scholarship has been on the question of violence and non-violence. Feminist scholars have also offered a variety of critical analyses of war and conflict focusing on the role of gender, sexuality, class, religion, ethnicity and race, among others. Importantly, antiwar perspectives not only help us to understand the nature of war, violence and militarism. They also help us to move away from a language of militarisation to envision possible futures and alternative ways of building communities and solidarities in times of emergencies. At the same time, we need to pay attention to the way in which certain forms of violence have a continuity in times of apparent peace.

By bringing the conversation on these themes into TGV, we aim to make visible the diversity of experiences of and perspectives on these issues within gender studies in Sweden, a diversity that stems from distinct situated knowledges that scholars carry with them. Moreover, we want to critically unpack discourses and changing approaches to Sweden’s history of non-alignment in the context of the recent decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) through feminist perspectives. We welcome abstracts for research articles, as well as contributions that come from collaborative projects and overlap with activist knowledge production or artistic contributions. The list mentioned below are only a few of the themes which could be addressed in this issue, and we are of course open to receiving new ideas related to the themes.

Feminist, queer, trans, anticolonial, Marxist and antiracist perspectives on:

• Violence and non-violence
• Relations between different contexts and different forms of violence
• Anti-war feminism
• Carceral feminism
• Critical approaches to peace studies
• Vulnerabilities and crisis
• Grievability, “killability”
• Political economy of conflict
• Emergency of war – what can feminists do? Is there space for diplomacy?
• Militarisation of language
• Securitisation
• Transformation of warfare through technology, including modern weapons, cyber
• warfare
• Military industrial complex, arms trade
• Military alliances between nation-states
• The nuclear threat
• Examining notions of nationalism and sovereignty in terms of boundary making,
• militarisation and neutrality
• Imperialism, colonialism
• Asymmetric warfare
• Embodied realities of violence during wars
• Everyday embodied violence
• Various scales of impact of war, e.g. on food and energy supplies
• Arms race
• Gendered violence during war

Timeline

• Abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note (75 words) should be sent to the special issue editors Riya Raphael (riya [dot] raphael [at] soch [dot] lu [dot] se) and Marta Kolankiewicz (marta [dot] kolankiewicz [at] genus [dot] lu [dot] se) by 20 June 2022.
• Response on acceptance of the abstracts will be communicated by 23 June 2022.
• Deadline for the articles 30 October 2022. Thereafter follows a double-blind review process. The aim is to publish the special issue in Winter 2022/2023.
• TGV is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary journal for current gender research in Swedish. Contributions in Scandinavian languages and English can also be included upon agreement.

See the TGV website for more information on format and formalities.

For questions, please contact the special issues editors Riya Raphael (riya [dot] raphael [at] soch [dot] lu [dot] se) and Marta Kolankiewicz (marta [dot] kolankiewicz [at] genus [dot] lu [dot] se) or the editors tgv [at] genus [dot] lu [dot] se. We reserve the right to select from the submissions.