Intedisciplinary Political Studies (Special Issue)

Deadline: June 22, 2019

A growing literature on ontological security has allowed authors to explore the link between the self-narrative of a state and its sense of being in the world by situating political communities in space and time. However, when an event disrupts, questions, contradicts, or challenges the dominant self-narrative of a state, the state’s identity becomes dislocated from its privileged position as it has never been fixed to begin with. Crisis then re-politicizes what had become common sense discourse, and creates demands for action, which could evolve to violence. In such instances, ‘memory must be defended’, as noted by Maria Mälksoo, inspired by Foucault’s ‘society must be defended’. Conceptualized in this way, the concept of defending memory and how it relates to securitization of memory in context of crisis opens up a wide range of possibilities for thinking about collective – that is, the state’s – identity formation beyond the identity/alterity nexus of self/other and more closely linked to the notion of ontological security, as well as within securitization theory, and at the same time linking it to politicization, and hence change.

This Special Issue of IdPS aims at exploring understudied dimensions of mnemonical insecurity in global politics in order to address the following questions: How do mnemonic conflicts emerge and develop across space and time? What kind of strategies political actors apply to engage in mnemonic conflicts? What kind of events allows for desecuritization and politicization of memory? How do mnemonic conflicts occur and express themselves in national, regional, and global contexts?

If you are interested in writing an article for this special issue, please send an email with your name and institutional affiliation, an abstract of approximately 250-300 words, and a short bio of no more than 200 words to the special issues editors (dfbecker@usc.edu, dbudryte@ggc.edu, eresende@esg.br) by June 22 2019.

The first draft of the article will be expected to be delivered at the end of September (max. 8,000 words with references). Contributions from the Global South or addressing issues in the Global South are especially welcomed.