Edited by John Kinsella and Nicholas Birns

Abstract of c. 500 words by the end of May 2024. For publication April 2025. See below for full details.

The issue is concerned with pacifism as both a mode of conceptualising and also interacting with the world. Non-violence is a characteristic of various spiritual and secular modes of both maintaining peace and also enacting conflict resolution, and this issue will have a strong focus on these agencies, but further, pacifism as a system of perceiving and interacting with the world, as a ‘complete’ philosophy will be considered.

Questions around pacifism as a human to human belief, or as a more encompassing belief in non-violence to all animal life will be considered. Further, is violence against the inanimate merely an issue of degrees, or is all change that operates with violent intentionality a contravening of pacifist ideals. The issue is interested in definitions of violence beyond the human and whether or not a pacifism that resists extinction, resists erasure, resists speciesism can coincide with non-violence in human relations.

In opposing war is the conscientious objector always a pacifist or are reasons more a case by case and context-driven issue? What are the special as well as personal parameters of pacifism? Can there be sustainable pacifist communities that are secular as well as the more historically defined ‘spiritual’? A pacifist will never see any war as being just, but we are interested in how attempts to justify violence lead to a faux politics of peace: violent acts to protect the peace, the issue of deterrence and balance of power. We are not interested in justifications of these positions, but rather pacifist arguments or argument drawing on pacifist knowledges that counter these arguments. There are plenty of affirmations for violence out there, and this issue is not about those.

We are particularly interested in work about those who have made non-violent choices to their social detriment, essays on recording or analysing anti-militarism, documents of non-violent anti-nuclear activism, considerations of modes of protest against the violence of the state, military, police, sporting (including crowd violence) or corporate bodies. Pacifism and environmental protest is a specific focus. And an examination of witness and reportage is another focus.

For example, this issue strongly orientates against colonialism and adopts a critical approach to the capitalist state, but (or and!) in doing so seeks pacifist models for restoring dignity and rights to the oppressed and compensating where possible for these vast wrongs. This issue is definitively anti-racist, but (and) seeks pacifist modes for redressing and alleviating these wrongs. And the same applies to all injustice of identity, gender, spiritual belief. How are inequities and crimes of the past and present addressed in pacifist ways? How can there be an effective pacifist resistance?

Rejecting Frantz Fanon’s notion that the colonised can only gain liberty and justice out of the ‘rotting corpse of the settler’, this issue nonetheless maintains that settler culture must be subject to critique. How is this achieved? These are the questions that I hope will be answered in the issue.

We welcome rereadings of historic texts, challenges to conventions of reading history, negotiations of political and ethical texts, finding a way through texts that are both violent and non-violent to resolve non-violent modes and methods. We would welcome personal memoirs of pacifist living, of alleviations of violence, and of methods for reducing the chance of violence in community and ‘conflict’ situations. This issue seeks to enact a mutual aid via peace.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

This is a fast-track project.

Send your title and abstract of c. 500 words, with a brief 'bioblurb', by 31 May 2024 to both:
John Kinsella <john.kinsella@curtin.edu.au>, Nicholas Birns <nicholas.birns@gmail.com>
with: 'Angelaki Pacifism Abstract' at the start of your subject line.

(In cases of exceptional interest, documentary and creative work, written and visual, may also be considered, send sample/s and details of your project, with 'bioblurb', to the editors by 31 May 2024 with 'Angelaki Pacifism Creative' at the start of your subject line.)

Full essays (5000-7000 words) by 1 September 2024. Firm latest date.

Peer review completed by 15 December 2024.

Delivery of all final material to the editors by 15 February 2025.

Editors deliver for publication by 15 April 2025.

The special issue will be republished as a hardback book in the Angelaki: New Work in the Theoretical Humanities book series (Routledge) approximately one year after the issue appears.

Angelaki journal: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cang20/current
Angelaki: New Work in the Theoretical Humanities:
https://www.routledge.com/New-Work-in-the-Theoretical-Humanities/book-se...