For a special issue entitled Discourses of Militarization and Identity: Literature of Conflict, we invite essays on the intersection of the cultural studies tradition in literature, art, cinema, television, as well as in visual and digital media, with the representation of war and the military in its various manifestations. Historical reference points range from civil wars to national, colonial, and post-colonial conflicts, the Cold War and post-Cold War global conflicts.

Submissions might address literary and artistic responses to conflict framed within cultural studies traditions, but also the use of these traditions in the discourse of war itself, i.e. in non-literary texts like historiography, non-fiction, military manuals, geopolitical handbooks etc.

Equally important in understanding the complexities of the militarization of the border as a social phenomenon is the way in which unauthorized migrants to make sense of border policing.

This special issue attempts to examine how border scholars interpret and (re)present the lives of those living in a militarized border and attempt to answer the following questions: What does it mean to argue for the inclusion of narratives of unauthorized migrants whose voices are hardly present in the discourse of border militarization? Can subaltern undocumented immigrants speak in a way that contests and challenges prevailing views of them merely as victims running away from their usually ‘Third World’ countries for political or economic reasons?

Strongly encouraged are submissions, especially in the areas of literature, geopolitics, military sciences, visual media, which move beyond representational analysis to address the overlap of and complicity between war/conflict discourse and the realm of military experience, i.e. the development and exchange of technologies, of financial, organizational, institutional, and logistical structures.

Topics ranging across the wide historical aim of the border studies in different national traditions might include, yet are not limited to:

1. military mobilization: imagining the enemy
2. war propaganda: heart and minds
3. the discourse of militarism and militarization
4. the experience of combat
5. the space of the battle field
6. the home front: shelters, homes, hospitals
7. the veteran: medicine, trauma, biopolitics
8. gender discourse: warriors, soldiers, cannon fodder
9. military technology: destruction and reconstruction
10. high-tech/low-tech war: from swords to drones
11. remembering war: memoirs and monuments
12. borders and borderlines