JISD Call for Papers: Special Issue on Indigenous Journeys of War and Peace

War is not a metaphor for Indigenous Peoples. It is a lived-condition, a historical inheritance, an ongoing structure of violence and oppression. It appears in militarized policing, in the service of Indigenous military personnel who fought in World War I and World War II for nations that denied their humanity, in economic blockades imposed on Cuba, and in the continuing genocide in Palestine. For Indigenous Peoples, war is experienced daily through structural and systemic discrimination. Indigenous communities have known war in its many forms, including violence that states refuse to name as war. In these continuing wakes of war, Indigenous Peoples endure profound trauma while sustaining life, memory, and survival.

Indigenous Peoples know ways of peace, refuge, third spaces, and new worlds built amid devastation. For example, the Zapatista communities of southern Mexico, who faced targeted violence forged autonomous territories grounded in dignity and collective life, reminding us that war can generate more than destruction. It can also produce imagination: new cosmologies, new forms of governance, and new modes of relation.

For this special issue of the Journal of Indigenous Social Development (JISD), we invite contributions that engage complexities of war, peace, and Indigeneity. What does war cost Indigenous Peoples in health, land, kinship, and spirit? Where do Indigenous Peoples find refuge when the world itself is hostile? What can emerge from these conditions, and what new worlds are being built in the eye of the storm? How do Indigenous Peoples practice peace? How have they transformed trauma into resilience?

Possible areas of inquiry

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes at micro (individuals and families, mezzo (groups and communities) and macro (systems, policies and legislation)-levels of life:

· Indigenous philosophies and theories of war and peace rooted in Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies, including how understandings of conflict, harmony, and relationality have been shaped, disrupted, or transformed through contact and colonization,

· The health and wellbeing impacts of war on Indigenous communities, including structural, intergenerational, psychological, and spiritual dimensions,

· Indigenous resilience, kinship, reciprocity, and relational ways of knowing, especially practices that sustain community wellbeing, cultural continuity, and self-determination in the face of war,

· The carceral system as an instrument of war, including the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Indigenous and Black peoples as a continuation of colonial violence,

· Indigenous Peoples’ relationships to imperial wars, including military service, conscription, and the contradictions of fighting for occupying states in World War I, World War II, and beyond,

· Targeted and internal wars against Indigenous communities, land defenders, and water protectors,

· Indigeneity and solidarity, including transnational Indigenous allyship and shared frameworks of occupation, resistance, and liberation,

· Third spaces and refuge, including how communities under siege build autonomous spaces of culture, care, collective governance, and survival,

· What war can generate, including new worlds, new epistemologies, and new possibilities for life beyond empire,

· Unofficial and unnamed acts of war, including economic blockades, sanctions, and resource extraction as instruments of imperial aggression,

· Environmental devastation, such as deforestation in Brazil, as a form of war against Indigenous lands, lifeways, and efforts to protect and maintain peace,

· Indigenous strategic and asymmetric responses that operate beyond military tactics, including political, economic, and social strategies that target colonial vulnerabilities, offset dominant power structures, and outlast the political will of adversarial forces.

Submission invitation

We welcome theoretical, empirical, historic analysis, community-based and practice-oriented submissions that honor Indigenous engagements with war and peace across the past, present, and future. Submissions will be peer reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis until January 29, 2027.