Call for Papers: Journal of Critical Peace Studies (JCPS), Submit by 1st December 2026
About the Journal
The Journal of Critical Peace Studies (JCPS) is an unconventional academic and video journal centering the voices and lived experiences of racialized, marginalized, and colonized communities across Peace Studies, International Relations, and related disciplines. We seek to reclaim “peace” from structures of power that historically use it to suppress dissent. Instead, we define peace from the location of the oppressed: peace as liberation from structural, cultural, and epistemic violence, grounded in critical consciousness and transformative action.
Call for Papers
JCPS launches at a pivotal historical moment. The world has shifted dramatically since October 2023, as witnessed through continuing genocides in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and Yemen; the collapse of the liberal peace architecture and the rules-based order; the intensifying climate emergency; and the advancing AI raising urgent questions for Higher Education. At the present chaotic moment, the rhetoric of modernity that used to mask the dark side of colonial modernity has lost its power to convince people of modernity’s promise.
We invite contributions that speak directly to this moment. We welcome working papers or research proposals across, but not restricted to, the following questions/ domains:
• How logics of colonial modernity operate in academic, political, social spaces.
• How can we undo logics and mechanisms of colonial modernity and imagine build alternative systems
• The present and future of liberal / neoliberal/Westernized universities ; critique of neoliberal metrics, rankings, AI discourses, future imaginations/visions , higher education policies, notions of knowledge economy, human capital, success (Critical University Studies)
• Imagining/enacting knowledge spaces outside the university ( alternative logics, alternative knowledge making and sharing mechanisms based on relational logics)
• Exploring, mapping, and questioning connections between genocides, wars and multiple forms of epistemic violence/ injustice; proposing clear pathways to undo epistemic violence and injustice.
• AI rhetoric, logics, developing/changing research and education cultures / Critical AI Studies
• Issues of Climate Justice/ indigenous visions , pathways to ecological balance / environmental justice
• Reparations and Restorative justice
• Exploring avenues for Autonomous Social Sciences, decolonizing knowledge/power/being, imagining and collecting pathways towards decolonial futures; Rethinking Social Sciences and Humanities education policies and practices, especially in parts of the Global South
• Challenges, dilemmas of walking decolonial pathways, and suggestions to overcome them.
• Charting liberatory agendas for peace and peace studies; questioning Western liberal peace practices; imagining, developing, collecting, and enacting pluriversal peace agendas.
• Exploring indigenous knowledge systems, logics, knowledge / research traditions, historical connections and encounters between people, ideas, and civilizations.
Submission Guidelines
We invite researchers, educators, scholars, students, peace practitioners, and policymakers to submit working papers or project proposals.
- Length: 1500 – 3000 words (flexible)
- Due Date: 1st December 2026 (This is when we begin the review process)
- Submission Email: thepluriversitylahore@gmail.com
For more details, refer here
