Calls for Proposals

Critical Histories of the Global War on Terror – Proposals Due October 1, 2026

Concrete barrier wall outdoors with painted artwork depicting two simplified, cartoon-style figures facing each other. On the left, a figure with a bird-like head and thin legs appears mid-stride, holding a long object resembling a spear. On the right, a figure in green patterned clothing kneels while aiming a spear toward the other figure. The wall panels are tall, off-white, and weathered with stains and cracks, and small debris lies along the ground at the base of the wall under a pale sky.
by |Published

Critical Histories of the Global War on Terror
A Call for Proposals from the Radical History Review
Issue number 163 (January 2029)
Abstract Deadline: October 1, 2026
Co-edited by A.J. Yumi Lee, Karen R. Miller, Golnar Nikpour, A. Naomi Paik

Radical History Review invites critical engagements with histories of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and its era of forever war, militarized incarceration, and imperial violence. 

On October 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a war against terrorism. Claiming to target those who had attacked “the heart and soul of the civilized world,” he called on the US military to wage full-scale invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq alongside incursions into other sites, particularly across Asia and Africa. Twenty-five years later, the United States and its allies have reprised devastating wars in West Asia, explicitly embracing imperialist violence to revive what they are calling “the West’s age of dominance.” 

 In contrast to mainstream security or terrorism studies, Radical History Review seeks critical assessments of the GWOT attentive to questions of power, empire, and resistance. How has the GWOT been waged, where, and to what ends? What has the GWOT transformed, destroyed, and enabled? What have the local and global consequences of the past three decades of the GWOT been in geopolitics, political economics, social worlds, and culture? How have people targeted by the GWOT responded to, survived, and resisted its incursions into their lives?

We encourage contributions that complicate conventional temporalities and geographies of the GWOT, such as studies that trace its genealogies to earlier moments of imperial violence or map its locations beyond those places with which it is most closely associated.

Some topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Periodization of the GWOT; engagements with its temporalities. Are we still in the era of the war on terror?
  • Reevaluations of the GWOT’s origin stories. 
  • Social histories of the GWOT and its effects on communities and social structures.
  • Material histories of the GWOT that assemble understudied archives and evidence.
  • Connections between the carceral logics of the GWOT and the detention of migrants and other targeted groups.
  • Capitalist industries of war-making and securitization, like weapons manufacturers, military logistics and labor outsourcing, surveillance, private security, etc. 
  • Effects of the GWOT on labor systems, migration flows, and/or strategies for managing surplus land and labor; relationships between the GWOT and Indigenous sovereignties.
  • Emerging geographies of the GWOT, such as AFRICOM, and connections among spatially separate geographies of the GWOT. 
  • Expansions of executive power in the US and abroad under permanent war, through instruments like the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the USA PATRIOT ACT, and activation of existing laws like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)
  • Discourses of race and religion in the GWOT, and the effects of the GWOT on the use of these categories, including the GWOT and Islamophobia, the GWOT and Christian nationalism, and the deeper histories of religious wars from prior eras, like the Middle Ages, that inform the GWOT.
  • Connections between the GWOT and histories of intimacy and/or social reproduction; intersections between the GWOT and questions of gender and sexuality.
  • Cultural representations of and responses to the GWOT, including in legacy media, new media, literary works, films, television, etc. 

Procedure for submission of material:

By October 1, 2026, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the material you wish to submit to our online journal management system, ScholarOne. To begin with ScholarOne, sign in or create an account at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-rhr. After signing in, select “Author” from the menu up top, and click “Begin Submission” or “Start New Submission.” Please include “Issue 160” in addition to the rest of your proposal title in the “Title” field when filling in the form that follows. Upload a Word or PDF document, including any images within the document. After uploading your file, select “Proposal” as the submission type and follow the on-screen instructions. Feel free to write to the journal’s managing editor at contactrhr@gmail.com if you encounter any technical difficulties or have any other questions about the process.

By November 1, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for further consideration. The due date for completed submissions is expected to be May 1, 2027. Those submissions selected for publication will be included in issue 163 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in January 2029.

Abstract Deadline: October 1, 2026.

Contact: contactrhr@gmail.com

Photo from https://archive.nytimes.com/atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/proud-painful-art-on-baghdads-blast-walls/.

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