Against War. Conflict Resolution, Peace, and Nonviolence
Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus recognised conflict (polemos) as the father of all things and the very source of justice and human relations. Similarly, Eastern religions and philosophies, like Buddhism or Zen, claim that reality rests on the balance of opposites, which is graphically represented by the famous figure of Yin and Yang. Conflict, however, does not mean war. Conflict is a heated confrontation that can nonetheless remain dialectical and peaceful, and it can unfold within the boundaries of civilised coexistence. Wars, on the contrary, are eruptions of violence and aggression that disrupt and suspend social and political homeostasis, and their conclusion is always gory and grief-stricken.
The outbreak of any war is often seen as an eruption of irrationality driven by nihilistic forms of aggression and the will to dominate. From a rational standpoint, war appears as an aberration justified by arguments that are as elusive as they are compelling. Philosophers, politicians, psychologists, anthropologists, ethologists, and the like have for centuries attempted to explain why human societies wage war, and why individuals can accept the idea of killing each other on a mass scale in the name of religion, race, honour, or national pride. When one considers that thousands of wars have been fought over human history, one cannot help but think about peace as something fragile and not durable. Is peace, perhaps, a state of exception? Is it a utopian condition, the Kantian “kingdom of ends”, where the ideals of justice and morality exist in their immutable perfection? If war, as a violent degeneration of conflict, seems to be the rule by which human history cyclically abides, peace is perhaps a rational and ethical reflection of the best desires of which humankind is capable.
Still, the vast majority of people want to live in peace and abhor war. Even when forced to endure the harshness of armed conflicts, people strive cling to the very idea of peace as the “promised land” to which they desire to return. Far from being a black-and-white matter, the interconnection of war and peace remains compelling and troubling for today’s world as it has been for our ancestors thousands of years ago. In contemporary wars, not unlike in ancient ones, thinking about peace from the perspective of war raises moral questions, ethical deliberations, and a broad spectrum of emotional responses: desertion, sabotage, conscience objection, disobedience, pacifism, diplomacy, humanism, and other forms of nonviolent reaction to war should be investigated thoroughly. Although war and peace seem to be two spheres of human experience that only exist in a state of mutual exclusion, their interconnection resembles that of wellness, life, happiness, and love to their opposite concepts of illness, death, sadness, and hatred.
Issue n. 9 of the CEIWJ aims to investigate the interdependence of war and peace from the perspective of close encounters. The editors invite the submission of articles investigating the idea of peace, broadly understood, to include the absence of war but also being against war from a vast spectrum of theoretical and critical perspectives in the fields of Cultural History, Memory Studies, Modern Languages, Oral History, Philosophy of Language, Postcolonial Studies, Psychology, Religion, Social Sciences, Ethics, Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, Gender Studies, History of Art, History of Ideas, Curriculum Studies, Linguistics, and Trauma Studies.
The editors encourage the blending of different approaches. Contributions from established scholars, early-career researchers, doctoral students, and practitioners will be considered. Case studies that include different geographic areas and non-Western contexts are warmly welcome. We invite, per the scientific purpose of the journal, contributions that focus on human dimensions and perspectives. The main axes of interests (among others) include:
- Theoretical perspectives on anti-war culture, pacifism, and nonviolence (e.g. criticism of violence, desertion and conscience objection, sabotage, desertion, and similar);
- Anti-war political and social activism (including diplomacy, conflict resolution, cultural mediation, NGOs, interreligious dialogue, and similar);
- Peace-making and peacekeeping;
- Diplomacy and political negotiation to avoid war and conflict;
- The role of women in conflict resolution and peacekeeping;
- Demobilisation, disbandment of arsenals, and conversion from war economy to peaceful forms of economic production (e.g. nuclear energy for medicine);
- Reconciliation after civil wars (including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and similar);
- Transitional justice and human rights in post-war contexts;
- Experiences of military deployment in peacekeeping;
- Anti-war literature (all forms from personal narratives to novels, poetry, drama, and similar. All literary genres can be considered, from war literature to fantasy, literature for children, science fiction, speculative fiction, and similar);
- Anti-war pop culture (all forms from music, comics, blogs, travel writing, and similar);
- Anti-war art (all forms from painting, sculpture, architecture, graffiti, craftsmanship, and similar);
- Education to peace and nonviolence through schooling, work, and culture.
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The editors of the CEIWJ invite the submission of abstracts of 250 words in English by 1 March 2026 to ceiwj@nutorevelli.org.
The authors invited to submit their works will be required to send articles of 8,000-10,000 words (endnotes included, bibliographical references not included in word count), in English by 20 May 2026. All articles will undergo a process of double-blind peer review. We will notify you of the results of the review in September 2026. Final versions of revised articles will be submitted in autumn 2026.
All manuscripts must adhere to the Journal’s style-sheet available at https://closeencountersinwar.org/instruction-for-authors-submissions/.