Call for submissions
Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales nº 4
Music and armed conflicts after 1945
Coordination : Luis VELASCO PUFLEAU
The role of music to contest, legitimize, comment, pacify or intensify contemporary armed conflicts has so far received little attention by musicological research – compared to the numerous existing studies on the two World Wars. To engage an interdisciplinary reflection on this issue, mobilizing tools of musical analysis, political sociology, social history, geopolitics and anthropology, the fourth issue of Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales will focus on the relationship between music and armed conflicts in the second part of the twentieth century: decolonization wars, civil wars in Africa, Latin America and Asia, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Falklands, Kosovo, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Libya, etc. Among the ideas concerning the relationship between music and armed conflicts, we can propose :
* Using music to mediatise and talk about war
* The role of music in the recruitment of child soldiers
* The use of music technology in military actions’ improvement
* The identification process engaged by music in the battlefield
* The use of mass media in broadcasting armed conflicts’ music
* The mobilization of music in humanitarian intervention
* The involvement of music in peace process
* The place of music in military research on torture
* The use of music as a marker of identity (particularly in order to designate the enemy)
* The role of music in massacres and mass killings
* The relationship between music and social memory of atrocities or hopes raised by contemporary armed conflicts
The comparative approach is encouraged in order to identify the processes used by different actors (armed groups, artists’ guilds, States, musicians, social movements, NGO) in different historical and geopolitical contexts. The fourth issue of Transposition aims to testify, on the one hand, the extreme diversity of appropriation forms and the use of music by the actors of contemporary armed conflicts and, on the other hand, to study the role of music in the process of triggering and ending of political violence.
Contributions outside selected topic: The Editorial Board encourages submission of articles about armed conflicts before 1945. The originality and research approaches, rather in a comparative perspective, will be however a criterion for publication.
Proposals for papers (in French or English), including a presentation of the research methodology and key findings, should be sent before 15 October 2012 to the following address: transposition.submission@gmail.com. The deadline for receipt of accepted papers is 31 January 2013 (protocol writing: http://transposition-revue.org/article/protocole-de-redaction).