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Social Text CFP "The Ends of War"

Social Text Call for Papers, "The Ends of War"

War is back and seemingly forever. In recent years the pacific neo-liberal rhetoric of globalization has been replaced by the Hobbesian war of all against all. This pervasive metaphorization of war blurs the boundaries between military and civilian, combatant and non-combatant, state and war machine, wartime and peace. But war discourse also operates as a strategy that partitions, separates and compartmentalizes knowledge, offering a highly seductive, militarized grid through which to interpret the world. Though the contemporary scene shows striking parallels with the neo-colonialism, counter-insurgency and "dirty wars" of the Cold War era, the current proliferation of war discourse often masks older continuities and material interests. Like a virus, it seems, war tropes have spread throughout the body politic and global economy.

What are the ends of war? This special issue of Social Text invites contributions that engage this critical question: by challenging teleological narratives of endless conflict; by confronting the seductions of metaphorization and militarization; and by analyzing the historic and material interests that they serve. “The Ends of War” will insist on the contingent and instrumental nature of war discourse and on the need to think beyond its global reach. Contributors are invited to challenge the hegemonic force of war, and contest its tendency to compartmentalize knowledge, divide and rule.

Contributions that link the work of gender or postcolonial studies, area studies, or political economy to analyses of war culture and technology will be particularly welcome. Possible areas of interest might include: the gendered imaginary of war; the Left’s ambivalent relationship to the seductive metaphorization of war; the colonial genealogy of contemporary war discourse; race and the military; buried histories of postmodern war culture in other conflicts; the arms trade and the permanent war economy; the militarization of intellectual life; media consolidation, censorship and the reporting of war; and the economic and environmental impact on the Global South.

Submission deadline: May 1, 2006

Essays of 7,000 to 10,000 words, including endnotes, and following The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, should be emailed as Microsoft Word documents to Livia Tenzer, Managing Editor, Social Text: ltenzer@rci.rutgers.edu. Hard copies may be sent to Social Text, 8 Bishop Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.