Call for Articles: The (Im)Possible Horizon of Antimilitarism – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Desertion, Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance
Call for Articles – This special issue, edited by Milica Popović and Nina Janz, invites interdisciplinary contributions on historical and contemporary forms of resistance to war, militarism, and military service. The issue explores desertion, conscientious objection, draft resistance, antiwar activism, and other forms of antimilitarist practices across different historical and political contexts.
The (Im)Possible Horizon of Antimilitarism – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Desertion, Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance
This special issue, edited by Milica Popović and Nina Janz, invites interdisciplinary contributions on historical and contemporary forms of resistance to war, militarism, and military service. The issue explores desertion, conscientious objection, draft resistance, antiwar activism, and other forms of antimilitarist practices across different historical and political contexts.
In the words of Muhammad Ali, one of the world’s most famous draft resisters, rejecting military service is embedded in the fundamental questioning of class, race, and colonial relations: “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.” In this special issue in TBD journal, edited by Milica Popović and Nina Janz, we wish to dive into the individual and collective practices, attempts and failures, which reject war, military violence and military service, in the full multitude of their forms and ideological representations.
Media headlines and political elites’ discourses warn that we are on the brink of a third World War. The mainstream discourses show a staggering silence about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, despite United Nations reports and pleas from nongovernmental organizations for a ceasefire; lack of reaction to the Israeli aggression on Iran, Yemen, Qatar, Lebanon, and Tunisia; and deep disinterest about conflicts continuing in South Sudan or elsewhere on the African continent. Despite the nominal support to Ukrainian refugees, any alleged empathy seems to wither away whenever the topic of peace is put on the table. Accurately enough, the United States (US) Department of Defense has been renamed the Department of War. The Trump administration is overly expressing their aim to annex Greenland, all the while causing high tensions on domestic ground as ICE indiscriminately attacks US citizens and immigrants across the country. Protests in Iran have been obscured by the country-wide internet shut-down by the Islamist regime. In response, new antiwar, anticolonial, and humanitarian initiatives are emerging. Some are standing on the shoulders of giants, opposing militarism as “an inexhaustible, and indeed increasingly lucrative, source of capitalist gain” (Luxemburg 1899). Some appear as products of new digital environments, building novel tools, strategies, and techniques.
Away from Hobbesian predicaments of the violent nature of humanity, conflict remains an inherent element of society, comprehending in itself an element of sociation (Simmel 1971). Violent resolution of a conflict is transferred to the state, and through obligatory and/or universal conscription, it becomes mandated as the essence of the citizenship pledge, making violence legal and rational (Mehta 2012). Historically, this model of militarized citizenship emerged with the modern “citizen-soldier.” The levée en masse during the French Revolution (1793) institutionalized the idea that the defense of the nation was the duty of all citizens. During the nineteenth century, the Prussian system of universal conscription further consolidated the link between military service, nation-building, and citizenship. Following the First World War, mass mobilization expanded these practices across Europe and beyond, embedding the expectation of military participation within modern citizenship regimes. The citizenship pledge translates into an ethno-national pledge in the case of civil wars, but the same processes remain at play.
Despite Benjaminian claims that one’s decision to participate in violence is a matter to wrestle with in solitude (Benjamin 1996), it is a collective decision as much as an individual one, or even a “public political issue” (Bernstein 2012). Walter Benjamin criticized the understanding of violence as a means to an end (1996), a path which Waltzer subsequently followed (1997). From these perspectives, defensive and/or anticolonial wars and revolutionary movements have not only violent means in their toolkit, a set of possible actions which may be justified but also necessary. Yet Frantz Fanon was equally critical of the uncontrolled spontaneous acts of violence which could endanger a revolutionary movement (Bernstein 2012). Just as violence requires contextual and historical decoding, and remains a diverse, variable and context-dependent phenomenon (Malešević 2022), the same applies to the resistance to it.
The mixed and opposed effects of helplessness and hope color the debates, leading to some key questions: Is it possible to stop a war? In particular, they raise questions about the role of individuals and communities in confronting war and militarism, and about the forms of agency that remain available under conditions of structural constraint. How, in the times of capitalist realism (Fisher 2014), can individuals and communities stand against the military- industrial complex? When ethno-fascist governments unite with big capital, even an attempt to deliver humanitarian aid becomes a mission impossible. In this liminal space between acts of rejecting violence and the (im)possibility of stopping the violence, as Giroux claimed, “hope becomes a discourse of critique and social transformation” (Giroux 2004).
Militarism uncovers “the complex networks of political institutions, value systems, social practices, rationalities and forms of subjectivity which tend towards the normalization and reproduction of political violence” (Rossdale 2019, 3) and remains “the compulsory, universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state” (Benjamin 1996, 241). Antimilitarism—in its own multitudes—uncovering the complex networks of political institutions, value systems, social practices, rationalities, and forms of subjectivity which tend against the normalization and reproduction of political violence, is at the core of our interest. Whether examining campaigns against the arms trade, antiwar social movements, demonstrations and individual humanitarian initiatives, desertion, draft resistance, and draft evasion, we seek to understand the larger implications through these alternative practices on the ground (Graeber 2007, 305–6).
This call invites interdisciplinary research exploring historical and contemporary forms of resistance to military service and war. While the emergence of modern mass conscription in the nineteenth century transformed the relationship between the state, citizenship, and military obligation, practices of desertion, defection, and refusal have existed throughout the history of warfare. We therefore welcome contributions addressing both the historical and contemporary phenomena and forms of military resistance. In particular, we are interested in how antimilitarist positions are articulated by individuals, groups, and movements, how acts of refusal or resistance are expressed—whether privately or publicly—and how they are perceived both at the time and retrospectively. We wish to investigate (self-)censorship practices and silences that surround pleas for peace and antimilitarist initiatives in a rearming society.
We wish to debate how resistance to war and militarism takes shape across different social groups and classes, and how the possibilities for activism and refusal may be shaped by the positionality of the antimilitarist subjects and the class, and other, privileges required for their act(ivism), possibly reserved for the “enlightened” middle classes (Lewis 2013). We intend to continue questioning the relationship between (anti)militarism, gender, race, and masculinity.
We want to reflect on whether just wars can exist (Walzer 1997), if we can differentiate between colonial, imperial, and defensive wars, and if there is an avenue for antimilitarism in anticolonial struggles. Finally, we seek to interrogate how the histories of antiwar resistance have been remembered, marginalized, or systematically forgotten – what Connerton described as “organized forgetting” (Connerton 1989, 14), and how such memories are mobilized or silences within contemporary political discourses. We are open to contributions which aim to answer any of these questions, but also propose new ones.
Possible themes and questions include
Forms of draft resistance:
– Desertion, draft evasion, and defection
– Conscientious objection and moral refusal to fight
– Everyday or hidden forms of resistance within military systems
– Organized antimilitarist movements and antiwar activism
Positionalities, social contexts and draft resistance:
– Militarism and nation-building
– Citizenship and military service
– Social and class differences and draft resistance
– Support networks and the influence of nearest environments
State reactions and repression:
– Legal frameworks: national and international
– Persecution and punishment: military and/or civil justice
– The transnational dimensions of desertion: refugee and asylum policies
Memory and historical reinterpretation:
– Rehabilitation and recognition of deserters or conscientious objectors
– Changing public perceptions of resisters (as heroes, traitors, or victims)
– The place of antiwar resistance in memory narratives
Please send your short biography (up to 50 words), title and abstract (max 300 words) by 01 July 2026 to milica.popovic@oeaw.ac.at and drjanz.nina@gmail.com
References
Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Bernstein, R. (2012). Violence. https://www.politicalconcepts.org/bernstein-violence/
Bibbings, Lois. Telling Tales about Men : Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War. Manchester University Press, 2009.
Bredenbröker, Isabel (2025) “Introduction. This is fine. Not.” The February Journal, no. 4: 4–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.60633/tfj.i04.99
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628061.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014.
Giroux, Henry A. “When Hope Is Subversive.” Tikkun 19, no. 6 (December 1, 2004): 62–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-2004-6027.
Graeber, David. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007. https://www.akpress.org/possibilitiesakpress.html.
Lewis, Penny. Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801467813.
Luxemburg, Rosa. “Rosa Luxemburg: The Militia and Militarism (1899).” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1899/02/26.htm
Mehta, U. S. (2012). Violence. https://www.politicalconcepts.org/violence-uday-s-mehta/
Rossdale, Chris. Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Simmel, G. Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations. New York: Free Press, 1971 [1908].
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
Kontakt
Milica Popović, Institute of Culture Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences milica.popovic@oeaw.ac.at; Nina Janz, Independent Scholar, Luxembourg drjanz.nina@gmail.com
The (Im)Possible Horizon of Antimilitarism, in: H-Soz-Kult, 22.05.2026, https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-162496.