CfP: Culture Wars in Historical and Global Perspectives: Contesting Identity, Values, and Power
Call for Papers for a Special Issue AUC Studia Territorialia.
Articles must be written in English and ideally should be 6,000 to 9,000 words long (excluding footnotes and abstract). Submissions should be sent to the editorial team at stuter@fsv.cuni.cz or uploaded via the Studia Territorialia journal management system. Authors should consult the journal’s submission guidelines for further instructions and style. All contributions are subject to double-blind peer review.
Deadline for submission of articles: September 30, 2025.
The concept of “culture wars,” brought to prominence by James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), describes ideological struggles over values, morality, and identity. While Hunter’s analysis focused on cultural polarization in the United States, the term has since been applied to broader conflicts that intersect political, social, and cultural domains. Although often associated with North America, these conflicts are far from unique to one region or era.
While culture wars are not new – and have been rooted in phenomena like religious schisms, colonial legacies, and ideological clashes – they have taken on new forms in the twenty-first century. Globalization, digitalization, migration waves, and populist politics have all amplified these older conflicts, bringing to the fore themes such as sovereignty, multiculturalism, and social norms. Disputes over values, symbols and social norms increasingly transcend traditional right-left political and socio-economic divides.
This special issue invites contributions that analyze culture wars as contemporary and historically grounded phenomena. Particularly welcome are comparative and case studies from North America, Europe, and post-Soviet Eurasia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in line with the journal’s focus and scope.
Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- ethnic, national and religious conflicts as historical antecedents of culture wars;
- the role of religion, secularism, and moral politics in shaping cultural divides;
- culture wars and international relations;
- ideological battles in times of systemic transformation and political transition;
- ideological dimensions of the Cold War;
- colonialism, decolonization, and culture wars;
- culture wars and populism;
- historical memory and contested heritage;
- social justice and discourses of empowerment;
- “woke culture,” identity, race, and gender debates;
- digital media, propaganda, and culture wars;
- the impact of globalization and migration on culture wars;
- socio-economic dimensions of culture wars from historical and modern perspectives;
- comparative studies of culture wars across regions, time periods, or political systems.