Special Issue Editors

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan 

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan 

The relationship between applied theatre and conflict has long been marked by urgency, innovation, and ethical ambiguity. Across geographies and historical moments, theatre has been mobilized to resist violence, to sustain communities under siege, to negotiate precarious forms of citizenship, and to imagine alternative futures when political horizons blur. From the agitprop experiments of anti-colonial movements to documentary practices emerging from armed conflict; from youth musicals in war camps to reconciliation projects in “frozen conflict zones” (including de facto and partially recognized states and autonomous polities such as Abkhazia, Rojava, or South Ossetia), theatre has been a vital space for witnessing, healing, and dissent, and sometimes for reproducing the very structures it seeks to contest.

Active conflict zones—whether civil wars, occupations, militarized borders, or the theatre of counterinsurgency (from the 1910s Ottoman Empire, through the Syrian Civil War, to ongoing conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine)—shape the conditions of performance: access, mobility, embodiment, visibility, and risk. Frozen conflict zones produce different temporalities: protracted waiting and generational trauma. Theatre practitioners working within these settings confront not only logistical and psychological challenges but also political responsibilities and ethical tensions. Applied theatre, often deployed as a tool for peacebuilding, education, reconciliation, or psychosocial support, plays a prominent role in conflict zones. Yet its discourses of empowerment and transformation can risk obscuring structural inequalities, complicity in violence, or alignment with state, NGO, or multilateral governmental agendas.

Applied theatre practices in conflict zones are as old as the field’s formative lineages. Critical scholarly attention to these practices, however, has consolidated primarily in the last two decades, reflecting both the accumulation of archives and repertoires, and the proliferation of such performance practices in contexts of violence, displacement, and social rupture. Researchers have documented applied theatre’s capacity for resistance (Rivers 2015), conflict transformation, and peacebuilding (Cohen, Gutiérrez Varea, and Walker 2011). The porousness between applied theatre and the performance of everyday life, along with questions of gender, ability, and embodiment in conflict-affected settings, has been central to such applied and analytical praxes (Thompson 2005; de Mel 2016). Refugee camps and de facto states continue to gain significance as applied theatre sites in view of new mass displacements and ongoing contested sovereignties (Skeiker 2021; Hallewas 2022; Kaplan 2022). While the dominant approach tends to celebrate applied theatre’s transformative capacities and promises while enhancing its pragmatics and instrumental frameworks, scholars have also critically addressed the ambiguities structuring applied performance work in conflict zones. Critical interventions have covered topics such as the dynamics of political economy (Edmondson 2018; Nicholson 2021), applied theatre’s entanglement with power structures (Hughes and Nicholson 2016), ambivalences and complicities of humanitarianism (Yoxall 2018), or biopolitical discipline and ethnonationalist assimilation (Altınay 2025) that shape applied theatre practices.

The current global conjuncture lends new urgency to these questions. The Gaza war and its humanitarian catastrophe, the mass displacement generated by the wars in Ukraine and Sudan, the afterlives of the Syrian conflict in refugee camps and diasporic communities, and the consolidation of frozen conflicts from the South Caucasus to Cyprus have all intensified applied theatre’s deployment as crisis response—while simultaneously exposing the limits and complicities of its established frameworks. Humanitarian infrastructures are being reshaped under geopolitical pressures that foreground questions of selective solidarity, donor conditionality, and the instrumentalization of cultural work. In this context, applied theatre’s claims to empowerment, healing, and transformation require renewed critical scrutiny. This themed issue brings practising and non-practising researchers into dialogue around applied theatre’s ethical and political contradictions in contexts where care, governance, and conflict intersect. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Complicities of care: Applied theatre within humanitarian infrastructures—NGO frameworks, donor agendas, the political economy of cultural intervention, and the tensions between care and governance in conflict-affected settings

• Soft power, propaganda, and state agendas: Applied theatre as instrument of state-sponsored reconciliation, ethnonationalist assimilation, counterinsurgency, or geopolitical legitimation

• Ethics of practice: Representation, extraction, safety, affective labor, and the politics of witnessing, testimony, and forensic performance in conflict zones

• Temporalities of conflict: How applied theatre navigates acute violence, protracted displacement, frozen conflicts, generational trauma, and the unintended consequences of peacebuilding frameworks

• Embodiment, difference, and resistance: Disability, militarized masculinities, feminist and queer applied theatre, and postcolonial and indigenous frameworks in conflict settings

Submission Instructions

We welcome research articles (c. 6,000 words) and shorter contributions such as interviews, provocations, practitioner statements, and case studies (c. 3,000 words). All submissions will undergo double-anonymous peer review in addition to editorial review.

Please send 300-word proposals for contributions, plus 100-word biographies for each contributor, to both editors at ertug.altinay@unimi.it and christina.banalopoulou@unimi.it by 31 October 2026.

Timeline

Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2026

Deadline for full drafts: 31 May 2027

Final copy deadline: May 2028

Publication: August 2028

References 

Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ. 2025. “Remembering the Army of the Robust Children in the Age of the Utopian Turn: Militarism and Turkification in Late Ottoman Youth Theatre.” Theatre Journal 77 (1): 1–24.

Cohen, Cynthia E., Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker. 2011. Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict: Building Just and Inclusive Communities. New York: New York University Press.

de Mel, Neloufer. 2016. “Playing Disability, Performing Gender: Militarised Masculinity and Disability Theatre in the Sri Lankan War and Its Aftermath.” In Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook , edited by Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic, 99–116. Cham: Springer.

Edmondson, Laura. 2018. Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hallewas, Anita. 2022. “Responsibility for the Other: An Ethic of Care in Applied Theatre Practice in Greek Refugee Camps.” In Applied Theatre: Ethics, edited by Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta and Monica Prendergast, 171–185. London: Methuen Drama.

Hughes, Jenny, and Helen Nicholson, eds. 2016. Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, Ellen Wendy. 2022. “Refuge and Resistance: Theater with Kurds and Yezidi Survivors of ISIS.” Humanities 11 (5), 111: 1–13.

Nicholson, Rashna Darius. 2021. “On the (Im)possibilities of a Free Theatre: Theatre Against Development in Palestine.” Theatre Research International 46 (1): 4–22.

Rivers, Ben. 2015. “Narrative Power: Playback Theatre as Cultural Resistance in Occupied Palestine.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20 (2): 155–172.

Skeiker, Fadi. 2021. Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting. London: Routledge.

Thompson, James. 2005. Digging Up Stories: Applied Theatre, Performance, and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Yoxall, Matthew. 2018. “At the ‘Frontiers’ of Humanitarian Performance: Refugee Resettlement, Theatre-Making and the Geo-Politics of Service.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 210–227.