Call for papers

Conflict theories and philosophies of peace. 100 years after Georg Simmel’s Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur

Georg Simmel is one of the founding fathers of the modern theory of conflict, thanks to sociological researches strongly inspired by his Lebenphilosophie ("philosophy of life") and the related dual conceptualization of ego and culture (the tragic opposition between Life and Form). Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur (1918) seals this original path.

“The conflict is not there to be solved” can be considered the aphorism which summarizes Simmel's idea of a not conciliatory dialectics where each pole, including the negative one (Alter, the different, the excluded, the marginal, etc.), plays a role only reserved to him, namely that of dialoguing with the other one in a state of complementarity. There is no starting unity – a good original nature or a romantic peace stability that at some point would be broken so that, once settled, the conflict could be restored. On the contrary, it is the becoming of ever-conflicting opposites that produces a common reality. Individuals, groups and institutions are built within a dense "web of conflicts" that produces "unity among differences", which will be questioned in turn. Hence the theoretical proposal: what is common, peace, is not only gained by eliminating the negative component (the evil, selfishness, diversity, etc.), nor by increasing the positive component (the good, charity, altruism, material and/or economic subsidies, etc.); it results instead from the management of forces that are both constructive and destructive, cooperative and selfish. Conflict flows in the tiniest spheres, giving matter to both individual and collective life ("conflict is the school of the ego"). Simmelian method implicitly calls for a non-violent rationality, aimed at reaching a 'modest amount of conflict' or intolerance, in order to preserve a relatively 'sufficient' degree of peace or social integration.

This original conceptualization of conflicts, ranging from everyday life to the whole society up to inter-state relations, reflects the historical consciousness of the transition from the era of great certainty to the current one of unfounded certainties. Such an approach inaugurates a third path with respect to pivot theories of Positive and Negative Peace, allowing to assess their explanatory power. According to Negative Peace Theories conflict has to be eliminated, finding turn-by-turn mediation, rights or social reforms, charity or empathy as suitable means. Here we find all the Theories of Peace as absence of war and violence, and those spiritualistic philosophies of peace adopting harmony-stability as the primary principle to be re-built or re-discovered: by fighting the evil, in the end, the evil will have to reunite with the good, as in the ideas of 'just' war, purification or redemption. According to Positive Peace Theory, instead, conflict is beneficial and must break out, harmony is to be constructed and struggles are essential means for social change. The final aim of those conflictive theories and spiritualistic philosophies of peace is to create a harmony to come, a new order (within couples and groups, in social and industrial relations, in political communities, and so forth) which is utopian and thus not clearly defined.

Having this in mind, Scienza e Pace / Science and Peace invites scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds to send papers which:

- address the dissemination and overcoming of the “web of conflict” theory, with a special reference to new conflicts (in everyday life, within and between groups, intercultural, political, environmental, international, ethical, religious, etc.) and the individualization/society relationship;

- reconstruct the genealogy of Simmel's theory of conflicts within its historical, political, economic and cultural context.

Instructions for authors

In order to respond to the call, please send to the Editorial Committee by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. a manuscript in Italian, Spanish or English, in compliance with the Editorial guidelines of the journal, by 30 April 2018. The manuscript will undergo thorough a double-blind peer review process. For any further queries, please contact the Guest Editor of the monographic issue, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

SOS Rosarno was launched in Winter 2011 as a campaign by a group of small farmers, activists and migrants based in the Gioia Tauro Plain. It evolved in 2012 into a formal association, which supported in 2015 the creation of a social cooperative, called Mani e terra. The idea of the campaign, conceived after the tumult of African orange-pickers exploded in January 2010, was to sell organic citrus fruits through short supply chains, essentially based on Solidarity Purchase Groups, in order to allow producers to pay migrant workers according to the law, to receive a fair remuneration, to guarantee healthy and affordable food to consumers, to protect the integrity of the environment. This paper aims to reconstruct genealogy and evolution of SOS Rosarno, with a special focus on ideology, organization and practices. It will draw mainly on political documents produced by the association and in-depth interviews with its members. On one side, the paper shows how the new social alliances implemented by SOS Rosarno might challenge the dominant food supply chain, which impoverishes small producers and lets migrant farmworkers be exploited. On the other side, it clarifies how principles of food sovereignty, self-management and democratic economic planning have been developed by SOS Rosarno within a new peasant civilization, which offers a viable alternative to the current economic crisis. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.

Rural worlds are about experiencing global changes impulsed by new forms of agrarian capitalism. The new agenda for Latin America development sees the interaction between old and new trends, which produces new conflicts. This paper takes the socio-economic doctrine of so-called neo-structuralism as a starting point for analysing policies on family farming under different perspectives: the role of the State, agricultural development models, the role of the market, the relations between different actors in the public sphere in terms of discourses and debates. The working hypothesis of the paper is to analyse Argentina as a case study, not as much as an example but rather as a specific case, which is developing in political frames and trends common to America Latina as a whole. This allows me to detect new processes of inclusion of family farming in the economic model, as well as traditional logic of its exclusion and subordination to the mainstream. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.

Economic inequality: crises, conflicts and threats for peace

Over the past decades, and especially immediately after the fall of communism, the issue of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth has been almost ignored by economists and by social scientists in general, although inequalities have been increasing both in developing and in developed countries. Even the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals ignored this issue, which is addressed instead in the current Sustainable Development Goals.

This attitude resulted from the idea that a larger economic equality would reduce the incentives for people to produce the right effort to improve their condition and, as a result, would impair economic efficiency. Over the last few years, however, many scholars, including Atkinson, Bourguignon, Deaton, Krugman, Milanovic, Piketty, Stiglitz and Wade among many others, and international institutions, like the OECD and the IMF, together with some NGOs like OXFAM, have been devoting their specific attention to economic inequality (although, to be fair, it needs to be acknowledged that some of those authors and institutions had been dealing with this issue for a long time already).

The reasons for this renewed attention have to be found in the negative effects of the increased economic inequality and in the consequences that this trend may produce even more dramatically in the future, in terms of open conflicts, threats to peace and crises of different nature (social, financial, economic, and including the migratory one).

As a matter of fact, besides ethical reasons for reducing gaps in income and wealth, economic inequality, both among and within countries, reduces social capital, weakens the citizens’ attitude towards social participation and inclusion, risks to increase poverty and in the end reduces the economic development potential of the countries that would be mostly in need of it. Moreover, a higher economic inequality induces the accumulation of private debt that may produce quite negative effects, as the recent global financial crisis has clearly shown.

The increase in economic inequality has many different causes. Yet, most of them seem to be related to the effects on less skilled workers and on the low-income segments of the population: the process of real and financial globalization (that moves manual labor from one side to the other of the world, and increases the weight of rents), technological progress (that increases the role of machines and capital with respect to labor in the production process), but also the reduction, if not the abandonment, of redistributive income policies and of the protection of workers.

Several solutions have been proposed so far to reduce income inequality, including a global tax on capital movements or a (low) global tax on wealth, combined with a return to the progressivity of income taxation; a tax on the use of machines (and robots) replacing human work; an increase of women’s participation in the labor market (at the condition of not being discriminated with respect to male workers); a reduction of precarious labor and an increase in the investment in human capital and in the qualification of workers.

Against this background, Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace has decided to devote a thematic section of its next issue to economic inequality and to its economic and not economic effects on peace, conflicts, and social relations in general. Just to provide a few examples, inequality might affect economic growth, social mobility, internal and global migrations, social services, corruption, the respect of the environment, the functioning of democracy and determine financial and economic crises. Needless to say, this will encourage both the raising of protests at different levels and the formation of social movements proposing changes in the economic model.

The journal invites economists, jurists, political and social scientists to submit research papers devoted to the analysis of the causes and consequences of economic inequality, and proposals to address and reduce this problem, from all possible points of view, but especially focusing on all possible implications for peace, conflicts and crises of different nature.

Instruction for the authors

In order to participate to the call for papers, please send by e-mail to the Editorial Committee (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) a (max) 300 words long abstract and (possibly) a list of key references before October 15, 2017.

Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace organizes a one-day conference that will take place on December 1, 2017 with the authors who will have submitted the abstracts found suitable by the editorial committee and who are expected to have at least a first draft of the paper ready by then. See here for the Conference programme.

Notice to the authors will be given by November 1, 2017.

A special issue of Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace will be devoted to the theme of the conference/roundtable and will include the papers presented at the conference and those that will be submitted in their final form by January 6, 2018.

Il 15 maggio è una ricorrenza di particolare importanza per i palestinesi. È il giorno in cui celebrano la Nakba, ovvero la 'catastrofe': tramite questa giornata viene mantenuto vivo il ricordo della cacciata dalle proprie abitazioni di centinaia di migliaia di persone e la mancata fondazione di un proprio Stato autonomo. La data scelta per questa ricorrenza ha un elevato significato simbolico: il 15 maggio 1948 segna, infatti, l'inizio della prima guerra arabo-israeliana, che si concluderà all'inizio del 1949 con la vittoria del neocostituito Stato d'Israele. È anche l'inizio delle lunghe traversie del popolo palestinese che, in circa 70 anni, hanno portato alla drammatica situazione attuale caratterizzata da violazioni sistematiche dei diritti umani e delle risoluzioni delle Nazioni Unite, da un regime di occupazione militare particolarmente opprimente, da continui espropri e dalla colonizzazione abusiva delle terre, da espulsioni individuali e di massa che, nel corso dei decenni, hanno prodotto una quantità tale di profughi che, ad oggi, metà del popolo palestinese vive al di fuori dei cosiddetti "Territori occupati", acquisendo il poco invidiabile status di "popolo della diaspora".

After considering plurilingualism's current social, cultural and political significance, in the European and national contexts, and the need to guarantee the right to plurilingualism in multi-ethnic classes, also in the light of the recent migratory flow, the article presents the results of an ongoing didactic experimentation based on plurilingual teaching and dialogical techniques and aimed at enriching students’ linguistic repertoire, making more effective the assessment of their linguistic and communicative competence, through plurilingual tests, and giving visibility to all the languages present in the class, thereby facilitating intercultural communication. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.

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Editor

Pompeo Della Posta

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Journal Secretary

Federico Oliveri

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Scientific Committee

Leonardo Becchetti (Università di Roma "Tor Vergata"), Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Francisco Jiménez Bautista (Universidad de Granada), Maria Rosaria Marella (Università degli Studi di Perugia), Domenico Mario Nuti (Università di Roma "La Sapienza), Massimo Panebianco (Università degli Studi di Salerno), Eduardo A. Sandoval Forero (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México), Alexis Tsoukias (Université Paris-Dauphine), Stefano Zamagni (Università di Bologna)

Editorial Committee

Carlo Belli, Roberto Belloni, Roberto Burlando, Paolo Busoni, Davide Caramella, María Lucía Carrillo Expósito, Thomas Casadei, Gianlugi Cecchini, Stefan Collignon, Daria Coppola, Simone D'Alessandro, Fabio Dei, Matteo Del Chicca, Pompeo Della Posta, Emidio Diodato, Giorgio Gallo, Federica Guazzini, Marcelo Labanca Correa de Araujo, Federico Oliveri, Sonia Paone, Leonardo Pasquali, Alessandro Polsi, Maurizio Pugno, Davide Ruggieri, Francesco Sarracino, Mauro Stampacchia, Fabio Tarini, Tiziano Telleschi

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Scienza e Pace – Science and Peace (SP) is the online and open access half-yearly journal of the “Sciences for Peace” Interdisciplinary Centre (CISP) established at the University of Pisa. New issues come out each year before the end of July and December respectively. Refounded in 2010, the journal seeks to provide an international, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, academic forum for all those who research, teach and work in the area of Peace Studies, adopting a multiplicity of methodological approaches.

Scienza e Pace – Science and Peace focuses in particular on: theoretical and empirical analyses of present-day and historical conflicts, taking into account their different (social, economic, political, juridical, cultural, religious, etc.) roots and their (structural, systemic, interpersonal, etc.) nature, within their specific contexts and at their multiple levels; theoretical and empirical analyses of new and traditional strategies for managing, transforming and solving conflicts, with the aim of constructing peace-based social and international relations. The journal encourages the submission of cutting edge, critical-oriented and interdisciplinary research papers.

Scienza e Pace – Science and Peace publishes original articles in Italian, in English and exceptionally in Spanish, when this choice is justified by the cultural specificity of the paper and its author. All research papers in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by two anonymous referees, not belonging to the editorial committee nor to the scientific committee.

A section of the journal will periodically focus on specific issues, that either the editorial or the scientific committee will address through open calls for papers. However, it will possible at any time to submit articles on topics not covered by calls for papers.

The journal also welcomes reviews of books within the area of Peace Studies. Publishers and authors are invited to send their publications in electronic or paper format to the editorial committee, which will make any possible effort to have them reviewed.

Ideas and statements expressed by the authors contributing to Scienza e Pace – Science and Peace do not necessarily reflect those of the director, the editorial or the scientific committee, nor of the “Sciences for Peace” Interdisciplinary Centre.

Referees are selected by the Editorial Committee among international specialists of the topics addressed by the paper, or among international experts of the disciplines prevailing in the paper. They support the Editorial Committee in guaranteeing to authors and readers a rigorous and impartial peer review process, aimed to uphold the quality of single papers and of the journal as a whole.

Referees do not know the identity of the authors whose papers they are evaluating, and vice-versa. In order to preserve the anonymity of the referees, their names will not be published.
 
Referees are asked to follow the evaluation criteria for research papers adopted by the journal. These criteria should analytically assess the pertinence, the originality, the scientific quality and the editorial quality of each paper submitted to Scienza e Pace - Science and Peace. Referees are asked to provide a general assessment of the manuscript according to each of these criteria, and to support the author with comments and suggestions on how to improve the paper. In conclusion, they provide a synthetic statement on the opportunity to publish the paper with or without major changes. They also assess the coherence between their comments and suggestions of improvement and the new version resubmitted by the author.

A more detailed overview of the editorial policy followed by Scienza e Pace - Science and Peace may be found in the Code of conduct of the journal.