Wartime Sociology

Matteo Bortolini — Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua (Italy) — Contact: matteo.bortolini@unipd.it — http://unipd.academia.edu/MatteoBortolini/
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2532-9334

Matteo Bortolini teaches sociology at the University of Padua (Italy). His research focuses on ideas, intellectuals, the production of expert knowledge, the history of the social sciences, and cultural sociology. Among his latest publications are Italian Sociology, 1945-2010 (written with Andrea Cossu, Palgrave, 2017) and A Joyfully Serious Man. The Life of Robert Bellah (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Elena Esposito — Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna (Italy); Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University (Germany) — http://www.elena-esposito.com
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3075-292X

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the Bielefeld University (Germany) and at the University of Bologna (Italy). Her current research focuses on a sociology of algorithms. Her project The Future of Prediction: The Social Consequences of Algorithmic Forecast in Insurance, Medicine and Policing is supported by a five-year grant from the European Research Council.

Flaminio Squazzoni — Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy) — https://www.unimi.it/it/ugov/person/flaminio-squazzoni
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6503-6077

Flaminio Squazzoni is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy), where he leads the Behave Lab, a centre for research and training in behavioural sociology.

David Stark — Department of Sociology, Columbia University (United States); Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodology, University of Warwick (United Kingdom) — Contact: dcs36@columbia.edu — http://www.davidcstark.com
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2435-9619

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University (USA) where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is also Professor of Social Science at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). His recent publications include The Performance Complex: Competition and Competitions in Social Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), “Moments of Identity: The Dynamics of Artist, Persona, and Audience in Electronic Music,” (Theory & Society, 2021), and “Racial Attention Deficit,” (Science Advances, 2021).

Submitted: 2022-05-16 – Accepted: 2022-05-16 – Published: 2022-05-19

Abstract

How can sociologists observe a war “in the making”? In issuing an “instant call for papers,” the editors of Sociologica suggest three lines of research: the semantics and the symbolic representation of war (of any war, but especially of this war); how political, military, economic, and social options and alternatives enter and exit the realm of the possible in connection with shifts in war semantics; how our understanding of “the day after,” that is of the future after the war is over, binds and even determines decisions in the present.

Keywords: War; sociological imagination; semantics; future; belief/disbelief.

In the Spring of 2020, several weeks after the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Editors of Sociologica sent round and then published an announcement calling for “the attention of sociology to the immediate and pressing present of the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of understanding the potentially long-term consequences of this extraordinary moment.” Our call for papers yielded 15 articles and 2 commentaries (see vol 14, nos 1, 2, & 3 as well as vol 15, no. 3).

Two years later, in the Spring of 2022, several weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of war in Europe, we at Sociologica are calling for papers on the topic of sociology in a time of war.

Is there a way to observe an ongoing war from a sociological point of view? While reporters and photographers can cover war as an object of journalistic observation, the representation and semantics of war can be an object of sociological observation.

Not as an exhaustive set, we propose several topics for a wartime sociology.

A first focus is on regimes of justification. How do different actors justify the decisions taken during the war? And how do the content and the structure of discourses about the war, its motivations, and likely development change in relation to various societal variables?

How is the war compared and connected to other historical or contemporary events that have been constructed as “obviously impactful” (such as the pandemic, other wars, or natural disasters)?

A second point could be to examine strategies of belief and disbelief — “suspension of disbelief,” if you like. How do alternatives gain (or lose) credibility during a war? How and when is common sense constructed that some options simply exit the picture and become non-thinkable?

A third line of reflection concerns societal perspective on the future: how does the future get stretched or reduced during a war? How do different kinds of actors imagine “the day after”? How does this affect the present and the decisions that are taken “now”?

We offer Sociologica as an open forum to host contributions on these topics or on other research questions connected with the current war in Europe. As an international online journal for sociological debate, with neither pay-walled access nor pay-for-publication policy, Sociologica can provide rapid dissemination and open discussion. We commit ourselves to peer review any contribution at the highest standards and publish rapidly all accepted papers.

We welcome proposals by scholars or teams of scholars for: (1) symposia on strategic topics for wartime sociology, organized through open calls for papers or as groups of papers already commissioned by symposia editors (or a mix of open and commissioned papers); (2) papers reflecting on the most important challenges, in the standard format of scientific articles or in shorter form; (3) flashback and focus papers discussing the war in Ukraine in the light of social history or using sociological tools to consider its challenges; (4) accounts and reconstructions of wartime events in unconventional formats.