Although both past and current armed conflicts have had deleterious consequences for women, this topic is still under-explored in academia. As Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf pointed out in 2002, “The situation of women in armed conflict has been systematically neglected”. This lacuna persists even though the experience of women during and after conflict is widespread. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the latest women-led uprising in Iran reinforce the urgency of engaging with women’s experiences during conflicts and post-conflict. The painful past of women affected by armed conflict and political violence is frequently overlooked in official memory and in the history of states for a variety of reasons.

Often, women’s voices and the memory of their ordeals during conflicts and in oppressive regimes are subsumed in a grand narrative of the suffering of the “whole nation”, which stifles the voices, testimonies, and claims of women victims, resisters, survivors, care givers, fighters, and mediators. Though men inarguably suffer greatly from the violence of political repression and armed conflict, women and girls are much more affected by sexual and psychological violence because they are regarded as repositories of ethnic and cultural identity. Moreover, women are exposed to manifold, intersecting forms of exclusion. Thus, women’s “aftermath” of conflict, as well as the burden of displacement, are experienced considerably differently than that of men. Although women are exposed to double or even triple jeopardy during and after conflicts and mass violence, their experiences nevertheless should not be exclusively viewed through a lens of victimhood. In that vein, we are looking for contributions that address all the dimensions of women’s victimhood but also their resistance to conflict and mass violence.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- Women soldiers
- Women heroes and resisters
- Women as caregivers during and after conflicts
- Women, anti-war protests, and peace movements
- Women as victims of political repression
- Wars, armed conflicts, and gender-based violence
- Gender-based violence as an occasion for solidarity across space and time
- Women perpetrators and collaborators in mass violence
- Women’s role in conflict mediation and post-conflict societies
- Womanism, feminism, and quiet diplomacy in post-conflict situations
- Gendered memories of refugees
- Feminism and societal body politics
- Feminism and international relations
- Feminist geopolitics of war
- Feminism in peace and conflict studies

Submitted articles should be in English and should ideally be 6,000 to 9,000 words long (excluding footnotes and abstract). Submissions should be sent to the journal’s editorial team at stuter@fsv.cuni.cz or uploaded via the Studia Territorialia journal management system. Authors should consult the submission guidelines on the journal’s website for further instructions and preferred style. All contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2023
Notification of status and next steps: February 10, 2023
Article submission deadline: April 15, 2023

Acta Universitatis Carolinea – Studia Territorialia is a leading Czech peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on area studies. It covers the history and the social, political, and cultural affairs of the nations of North America, Europe, and post-Soviet Eurasia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal is published by the Institute of International Studies of Charles University, Prague. It is indexed in the SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, DOAJ, and CEEOL databases and others.