EJIS special issue call - Who, what, where is criticality and post-coloniality in security studies?

BISA journal the European Journal of International Security (EJIS) invites contributions to a special issue on criticality and post-coloniality in security studies.

“Critical security studies” has made its mark in re-directing the scholarly discourse from the state’s to peoples’ security, and from survival to emancipation, by challenging the positivist assumption and the state-centric ontology of traditional security studies. Yet there is a need to reflect on critical security studies’ own assumptions. Is, for instance, the critical gaze of critical security studies blurred by a western cosmology, and can it be refocused through an examination of more diverse epistemic frames from across the global South? Or is the sharp and enduring focus of critical security studies on how power constructs exclusionary hierarchies a useful means of (further) decolonising the discipline? And what of the assumption, either explicit or implicit of ‘standpoint epistemology’ whereby knowledge from the margins is considered ‘better’ than knowledge from the ‘centre’?  What constitutes ‘better knowledge’ and how is the epistemic authority of the marginalised/hegemonic voice established? Relational ontologies (across western and non-western philosophy) create space for imaginative approaches to the problems created by the exclusionary binaries that are notionally fixed and explained by epistemic hierarchies, but are all epistemic hierarchies necessarily unwarranted, especially in the context of the material challenges posed by climate change and global pandemics? We invite contributors to engage these and related questions.

We plan to publish the special issue in 2023.  Papers should be 9-12,000 words and contributors should consult the journal’s Instructions for Authors. We plan to publish seven articles in the special issue. Paper proposals should be submitted to the lead editors Navnita Behera (navnita@iriis.in), Jennifer Mitzen (mitzen.1@polisci.osu.edu) and Jason Ralph (j.g.ralph@leeds.ac.uk) by 16 December 2021.  

This is a call for papers, not a call for guest editors. The issue will be edited by the lead editors (as listed above) and they will decide whether to publish the paper once the process of double blind peer review has been completed. Paper proposals should contain a 250 word abstract and an indication of how far advanced the paper is. Women scholars and those in or from the global South are especially welcome, and EJIS will continue its current practice of not publishing all-male issues.

Prospective contributors will be invited to an online workshop in April 2022 (exact date tbc). Papers should be submitted to EJIS for peer review no later than July 2022. 

Please direct inquiries to the lead editors listed above.