Proposal Submission Deadline: June 30, 2019

Violence. An International Journal is launching a call for papers on the theme “Religions and acts of violence”. This theme section will be coordinated by Mohamed Ali-Adraoui (Marie Slodowska Curie Fellow, Georgetown University and London School of Economics).

For its general articles’ section, Violence: An International Journal is also welcoming papers that deal with issues of violence and exiting violence. Each issue will be coordinated by its two Editors-in-Chief: Scott Straus (UW-Madison) and Michel Wieviorka (Foundation Maison des sciences de l’homme).

The outbreak of movements and conflicts that adopt violent and sometimes revolutionary religious language has caused certain questions to resurface, about the nature, conditions, and impact of a violence that claims to have a religious affiliation. This report will examine the dynamics of exiting violence and will address specific theoretical and empirical examples in which religious actors, discourses, and imaginaries have intervened to prevent, initiate, strengthen, or support strategies for preventing or exiting violence.

In many religions, in the Arab-Muslim world, as well as in South America, many Asian countries, and elsewhere around the globe, there are political structures that involve religious imaginaries and actors who claim to represent religious communities. These actors insist that they defend the interests, plans, and world views of the religious communities they believe they represent, sometimes changing the language and the social and political parameters of a conflict, even when that conflict does not have religious origins. This aspect is essential, not only for understanding the sociology of certain acts of violence, but also for understanding the mechanisms that may help to exit violence.

More information on: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH)