Contributors are encouraged to:
 

• Focus on how and why the nuclear attacks on Japanese cities challenged our understanding of the military, militarism, and militarisation in ways that have yet to receive the attention they deserve, or from an altogether different approach;
• Probe what role the memory—or the forgetting—of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played in Japan’s historical transformation into a demilitarized state, that remains, paradoxically, protected by America’s nuclear umbrella;
• Examine the role of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in providing a template for the commemoration of genocides and war crimes internationally;
• Consider the local stories of individuals, families and communities as intellectual resources that enhances our understanding of world politics (e.g. the everyday lives of Hibakusha, the place of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our politico-strategic imaginary, the value of nuclear deterrence, or the future prospects of achieving a nuclear-free world);
• Reflect on how Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been used to justify and critique the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and failure to conclude a global nuclear convention;
• Engage with the broader issue of nuclear energy and radiological contamination in Japanese politics and society (e.g. Fukushima, art about the bomb, or the problem of waste);
• Discuss the emergence of a domestic Hibakusha culture in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the subsequent inclusion and exclusion of various cohorts within Japanese society, or the later globalization of the concept of Hibakusha to others affected by ionizing radiation; and
• Explore possibilities for connecting the local with the global and the particular with the universal (e.g. the emergence of the nuclear disarmament movement, contrasting Japanese and German attitudes to nuclear power, or solidarity in the nuclear age).

The special section will be published in order to commemorate the 60th anniversary of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945.
 
Key details:
Abstracts:                                30 November 2014
Invitations for full papers:        December 2014
Papers due:                             31 March 2015
For peer-reviewed Articles:     6—8,000 words
For Encounters essays:          Up to 2,000 words with images
Publication date:                     August 2015
 
Contact:
N.A.J. Taylor
Email: [log in to unmask] and Twitter: @najtaylor
Robert Jacobs
Email: [log in to unmask] and Twitter: @bojacobs  
 
About the journal:
Critical Military Studies provides a rigorous, innovative platform for interdisciplinary debate on the operation of military power. It encourages the interrogation and destabilization of often taken-for-granted categories related to the military, militarism and militarization. It especially welcomes original thinking on contradictions and tensions central to the ways in which military institutions and military power work, how such tensions are reproduced within different societies and geopolitical arenas, and within and beyond academic discourse. Contributions on experiences of militarization among groups and individuals, and in hitherto underexplored, perhaps even seemingly ‘non-military’ settings are also encouraged. All submitted manuscripts are subject to initial appraisal by the Editor, and, if found suitable for further consideration, to double-blind peer review by independent, anonymous expert referees. The Journal also includes a non-peer reviewed section, Encounters, showcasing multidisciplinary forms of critique such as film and photography, and engaging with policy debates and activism. For more info: www.tandfonline.com/rcms
 
 
About the guest editors:
N.A.J. Taylor is a visiting scholar and Australia Awards fellow at The New School. He is also associate editor of the scholarly journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge), and the curator of the Archive of Nuclear Harm. His research focuses on alternative pathways to WMD-free worlds, particularly from inter-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. For more info: nuclearharm.org/curator

Robert Jacobs is an associate professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. He is the author of The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age, the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, co-editor of Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Literature, and an executive editor of the Asian Journal of Peacebuilding. For more info: bojacobs.net