From 5 to 9 November 2024, the "Sciences for Peace" Interdisciplinary Centre (CISP) at the University of Pisa will host the Annual Conference of the European Peace Research Association (EuPRA): Towards Utopias of Peace. Theories and Practices of Peace, Hope and Resistance in Troubled Times. The related call for papers is accessible below.

Participants in the EuPRA 2024 Conference are invited to send their papers to "Scienza e Pace / Science and Peace", the CISP online open access journal, to be considered for publication. Papers received by the Editorial Board (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) before 31 January 2025, and accepted after a double-blind peer review, will be included in a monographic issue. Papers received after this date and accepted will be published in other mixed-topic issues.

Call for papers

"Peace cultures thrive on and are nourished by visions of how things might be,

in a world where sharing and caring are part of the accepted lifeways for everyone.

The very ability to imagine something different and better than what

currently exists is critical for the possibility of social change”

Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace (2000)

We are currently facing an era of global crises marked by injustices, wars, pandemics, endemic violence and environmental disasters, not just in Europe but also worldwide. Elise Boulding's depiction of peace cultures, where it is not only permissible but desirable to question the limits of our imagination through utopian thinking, stands out as a beacon of hope and resilience, emphasizing the importance of unity and compassion. According to Boulding, our ideal visions for the future are not mere escapes from reality. Instead, they serve as catalysts for positive societal transformation, steering us away from violence and injustice towards a harmonious society (Boulding 2000, 29). With this in mind, we are calling on peace scholars, professionals, activists, and artists to collaborate and discuss potential directions and solutions for our challenging era.

Across Europe, nationalist sentiments, misogyny and racism have grown louder, gaining significant traction in numerous countries. Hate speech and group-based enmity are exacerbated with the use of modern communication channels like social media and other online platforms. At the same time, these forums and media also hold great potential for all those who want to counteract the current developments; a spirit of solidarity remains among peacebuilding practitioners, who try to break the patterns of violent communication online. This shows that people - including peace researchers - still have the ability to adapt, innovate and be creative in the face of adversity.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves:

- What are the Utopias of peace in Europe (and beyond) in this day and time?

- What lessons of resistance and resilience can we draw from peace research?

- How can peace research help us to comprehend and address sustained and emerging conflicts?

- What are the current power dynamics in Europe (and beyond) and what are their consequences for global peace?

- How can civil society resist violence and promote peace and stability?

- How can peace research contribute to societal diversity and inclusion?

- How do early career scholars and young activists address today's challenges?

We invite submissions of papers, roundtables, panels, and workshops related to peace in Europe and its neighbouring regions. We particularly encourage the newer generation of peace scholars and activists to respond. In line with the general principles of EuPRA, our emphasis is on promoting intersectionality, inclusivity, diversity, and equality, both as overarching themes and practical approaches in the conference. While we suggest several sub-themes for the conference in our Call for Papers, we are also open to considering topics spanning a wide range of interdisciplinary issues pertinent to peace research.

Themes

1. Arts and Peace

2. Nonviolence, Resistance, Activisms and Liberation as Peace

3. Geographies of Peace, Contested Spaces and Resistance

4. Youth, Peace and Security

5. New Conceptualisations of Peace and Decolonizing Peace

6. Political Economy, Ecological Economics, Degrowth and Peace

7. Democratic Participation, Social Movements and Peace

8. Global Health, Care, Peace and Justice

9. (New) Media and Peace

10. Feminist Peace Research

11. Math, Computer Science and Peace Studies

12. Peace Education and Philosophies

13. Disarmament and Peace

14. Mobility, Security, Borders and Diasporas

15. Peace Mediation, Peacebuilding and Dialogue(s)

16. Other: You can submit a topic suggestion if the above categories do not fit your paper, workshop, panel, or roundtable.

Submit your abstract

Please submit your proposals by completing the form (link below) by 29 February 2024.

To submit your abstract, create an account here or log in here.

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All abstracts should be written in English.

The war in Ukraine has been going on for more than a year, without agreements on temporary 'ceasefires' or evidence of real negotiations. The difficulty in launching effective negotiations, the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, and the remilitarisation of States, are re-proposing an international disorder scenario and reducing the spaces for 'third' and 'neutral' subjects, which should act impartially and guarantee justice and respect for international law. The article aims to rehabilitate the categories of 'neutral' and 'third' in international dispute resolution processes and raise problems and contradictions that their disappearance is causing for a world order of peace and security.

This article intends to point out the geopolitical and social impacts that the war in Ukraine-Russia will cause in the medium and long term, in relation to the multiple crises (energy, food, etc.), facing world society. The methodology is a comparative study between two ways of confronting capitalism from a Western and an Eastern bloc. In addition, we use the Transcend Method, which constitutes a way of thinking from Research for Peace perspective through a process of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, accompanied by a bibliographic review of the latest events. The facts point to a crisis of capitalism and the provocation of confrontations to maintain its hegemony against other actors such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others, who are interested in a new world order in which the US ceases to be hegemonic. The Ukraine-Russia war is one factor in the multiple cards that are being shuffled to break globalization. The conclusion points to a new world order that will emerge as a more plausible one in which the US and China will clash in the coming years to build a new security paradigm with their respective satellites. This will further polarize relations between the US and the EU on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other, as extremes of future conflicts.

This paper aims to rethink the narrative of peace and war by highlighting some underlying conceptual misrepresentations in Peace Studies. Positive Peace is well established in Peace Studies as an original 'good' state (of man, of society) that has been broken, but which can be restored through the mitigation/elimination of 'negative' factors be they inequalities, dehumanizing technology, corrupt institutions, asymmetries of power. As if to say that the negative/evil is an accident of history and, by fighting it with positive means (empathy, charity, welfare, empowerment, economic interdependence, international agreements, etc.), negative/evil will have to reconcile with the good/the positive: underlying idea of peace and. conflict-free future societies This imperfect version did not consider the dialectic of opposites in its full meaning, ending up ostracizing the conceptions that raise distinctions on the 'goodness' of man. It translated them into almost exclusively intimidating aphorisms, spreading ambivalence towards war. The contract theory (Hobbes) wants to demonstrate that the State has the role of mediator and controller of selfish and destructive tendencies of individuals; in this way, it acts as the guarantor of agreements between individuals for mutual security (propitiating the idea of civil society). Sociality (Rousseau) is understood as a secondary, non-natural act, invented by human beings out of fear of the other and of the unknown, moved by both good and negative passions. In Vom Kriege (von Clausewitz) war is a tragedy led by misuse of politics: explaining it in its matrices and techniques has the aim of developing strategies for making both war and peace. Having rethought these cardinal concepts, and other cascading ones (primarily conflict and nonviolence), the paper tests their explanatory impact linking theory and praxis in regard to today’s war between Russia and Ukraine.

The enlargement of NATO in the 1990s was driven by multiple reasons, but mainly by the strong desire of some former socialist countries to sever all ties with Russia, due to concerns about a potential resurgence of Russia's imperial ambitions. Moreover, the negotiations for NATO accession served as a tool for Eastern European countries to expedite their inclusion into the European Union. The conflict in ex-Yugoslavia also presented a new task for the Atlantic Alliance, which, since its armed intervention in Bosnia, reinvented itself as an instrument for pacification, democratization, and the defense of human rights in Europe and elsewhere. The European Union initially proceeded slowly and cautiously, but the security concerns raised by the conflict in Bosnia likely forced the Union to accelerate the inclusion of Eastern countries. In the beginning, European leaders aimed to include only a few countries, such as Poland and the other members of the Visegrad Group. Finally, in 1997, when the European Union decided to open its doors to all Eastern countries, except Ukraine, the political and economic reforms imposed on the candidate states facilitated their accession to NATO, including the Baltic states. This helped to resolve some political issues, such as the position of minorities within the new democratic states, which could have hindered their inclusion into NATO.

Two kinds of security constellations are imaginable among great powers: the classic balance of power (Realism) or cooperation in the form of collective security (Liberalism). This article posits that the latter has more chances to prevent wars than the former. The case study that is developed is the relationship between Russia and the West after 1989. The West failed to integrate Russia (on an equal footing) in the Euro-Atlantic security architecture after the Cold War. NATO did not only remain in existence; it also expanded on a regular basis, with the promise in 2008 to include Georgia and Ukraine. The result was the continuation of the balance of power game between Russia and the West, finally ending up with the war in Ukraine, something that could have been predicted on the basis of the theory, and that was actually predicted by experts like George Kennan already in the 1990s.

Russia's aggression against Ukraine has had, among other consequences, that of, once again, legitimizing war and, more generally, the military as the key instrument for conflict resolution. The escalation of the conflict has also highlighted how strong remains in our political culture the idea that peace essentially means the absence of war. But the idea of peace as mere absence of war strongly resembles what Tacitus puts in the mouth of the Caledonian leader Calgacus: "where they make desert, they call it peace." In Peace Studies, peace is generally understood as being something much richer and more articulate than the mere absence of war. Alongside a "negative peace," characterized by the absence of physical violence, we thus find, thanks to a fortunate insight of Johan Galtung, the broader idea of "positive peace”, based on the absence of not only physical but also structural and cultural violence (1964). In this article, expanding on the reflection on "positive peace," we reformulate the concept of peace by reconnecting with the biblical idea of peace-shalom, and then we focus, from a systemic perspective, on the interactions between means and ends, providing exemplifications of what has been argued.

Support for the Ukrainian government in the war against the Russian invasion has been justified, in Italian (and European) public opinion, with the need to defend an aggrieved people: parallels have been drawn between the situation in Ukraine and the partisan struggle against Nazi-fascism, and it is has been insisted that peace cannot be built without re-establishing the right violated by Putin's government. This article points out that such a justification has two weaknesses that make it difficult to accept. The first is an oversimplification: being based on crude conceptual pairs (good/evil, aggressors/offenders), the argument of the need to defend a people under attack does not allow one to grasp the complexity of the situation and, therefore, to propose effective solutions. The second weakness is the incoherence between the means one wants to use (war) and the objective one wants to achieve (the defence of the Ukrainian people): an incoherence due to the fact that war - especially if protracted in time and conducted with highly destructive weapons - necessarily implies for the people suffering it a burden of death and destruction at least comparable to the evils of foreign domination. In conclusion, the article reflects on the duty of men and women of thought, which is not to declare war just (or inevitable, or holy), but to remind the ruling classes and public opinions of democratic countries of the need to put an end to violence, to put the solution back to negotiations and reason, to try to build bridges between peoples despite everything.

Ukraine’s conflict is helping to highlight the underlying logic of conflict representation and participation, including affective and empathic involvement. In particular, some interpretations in the literature suggest that media images would draw viewers’ attention to the conflicts of Others, whether geographically or culturally distant. This theoretical paper examines such mechanisms in the complex ecosystem of online platforms, which are sometimes naively perceived as powerful triggers for affective participation. Using classical approaches to understanding media’s role in conflicts, such as the CNN Effect, we will explore how visibility mechanisms activate sensible politics. In this way, the Ukrainian conflict is a laboratory for observing scenarios in the making.

Starting from the famous sentence by pope Paul VI (1967): “Development is the new name for peace”, the paper argues that a credible and effective strategy to achieve peace in the Ukraine war as well as in the other 168 wars being fought in the world, today, is to build up new institutions of peace, both in the political and in the economic arenas. Meanwhile, the paper advances a concrete proposal to arrive, in a short time, at a peace negotiation that is credible and enforceable. The spirit of the paper is the same as the one crystallized in Erasmus’s sentence: "An unjust peace is better than a just war".