CfA
The Making of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the “Gray Areas” of War, 1945-2011
Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines
18.12.2026, Paris
More: https://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/12940
Abstract
Now ubiquitous in Western Europe, the idea of the “return of war” (Heisbourg, 2021; Marangé, 2026) betrays a perspective that pays little heed to the wars waged elsewhere in recent decades. For Europeans and Americans, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR meant the disappearance of direct threats and the dawn of an era marked first by “peacekeeping” and humanitarian military interventions and then by the global war on terrorism. However, far from ushering in the supposed end of war, armed conflicts continued to shape throughout this period the experiences of people living in the Middle East (First Gulf War, Iraq War, civil wars in Syria and Yemen, clashes between Israel and its neighbors), in Africa (civil wars in Algeria, Rwanda, Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia, among others; war in the Sahel), in Asia (clashes between India and Pakistan, civil wars in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, war in Afghanistan), and in South America (armed conflicts in Colombia and Peru).
Yet the “return” of war to the forefront of Western concerns has prompted renewed questions about the ability of entire fields of research to convince policymakers of the relevance of the knowledge they produce. The recent debate sparked among scholars in Peace and Conflict Studies by the publication of an article provocatively titled “The Demise of Conflict Studies” reflects these uncertainties. Its authors argue that the current challenges to the post-Cold War international order have reduced institutional demand for knowledge by undermining the mechanisms for intervention, mediation, and conflict resolution that served as the field’s primary outlets and channels of influence (Lacher and Guichaoua, 2026). In response, other scholars argue that this assessment unduly reduces their field to its Western institutional sites and its uses within intervention policies, thereby conflating the waning of certain forms of expertise with a more general decline in knowledge about conflicts, even as the sites where such knowledge is produced, its audiences, and its uses are being reconfigured (Fekadu Mulugeta, Lacher, and Guichaoua, 2026).
Far from being relevant only to scholars whose very subject is war, such a debate invites us to examine more broadly how knowledge in the humanities and social sciences has been produced and/or used in contexts of war through the lens of the long history of the relationship between academic knowledge, power, and societies in wartime. This topic, on which this issue of the Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines will focus, has already been explored in some depth with regard to the experiences of scientists during the two world wars, in particular European or U.S. scientists; this remains true even if we focus exclusively on the social sciences and humanities, which have nonetheless received comparatively less attention from historians of science (Becker, 2003; Price, 2008; Chandivert, 2016; Ginsburger, Robic, and Tissier, 2021; Šimůnek, 2021; Gouarné and Kirtchik, 2022). In the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the participation of social science researchers, more specifically anthropologists, in programs designed to provide the armed forces with the knowledge necessary to “win the hearts and minds” of civilian populations has fueled debates within the discipline (Forte, 2011). It has also led historians of the United States to explore the origins of these relationships and the emergence of a “military-intellectual complex” (Robin, 2003) during the Cold War (Engerman, 2009; Farish, 2010; Rohde, 2013; Solovey, 2015; Bessner, 2018; Solot, 2022). By comparison, histories of the European social sciences after 1945 devote relatively little attention to the wartime contexts in which scientists worked, most notably the wars of decolonization (important exceptions include Schmitt Pantel, 2012, and Pérez, 2022). This has contributed to narratives that treat the experience of war as a parenthesis in the trajectories of scientific actors and in the history of disciplines. In addition, these narratives rarely adopt a transnational or global approach (Solovey and Dayé, 2021) and rarely engage with scholarship on the humanities and social sciences in wartime contexts in the Global South (such as Saraiva, 2022), which reflects a broader trend in the history of science (Collyer and Dufoix, 2022).
This issue of the Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines aims to foster such engagement and dialogue by examining how the contexts of war in the second half of the 20th century shaped the humanities and social sciences by generating demands for knowledge, forms of mobilization, and various uses of such knowledge, thus shifting and challenging customary frameworks of knowledge production as well as blurring the distinctions between fundamental and applied knowledge. It is based on a twofold premise. The first is the hypothesis that experiences and practices linked to contexts of war are not marginal in the history of the humanities and social sciences. Instead, they have played an important role in reshaping their dynamics and must, as such, be reintegrated into their historiography. The second premise shifts the focus to experiences situated in the Global South, regardless of who the protagonists may be. Armed conflict has unfolded in various and often combined forms (guerrilla movements, wars of decolonization, civil wars, interstate wars) in these regions from the end of World War II in 1945 to NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011, which marked the onset of a crisis in the post-Cold War interventionist paradigm. This period also saw the institutionalization, professionalization, and/or “nationalization” (Roussillon, 2008) of the humanities and social sciences in many regions of the Global South. In some countries, knowledge production gradually took on characteristics that echo the reconfigurations of the relationships between knowledge, institutions, and social demand in the context of war. These include the weight of foreign and international funding agencies (Mandressi, 2023), the prevalence of contract-based research, the “expertization” (Romani, 2016) or even the “commodification of knowledge” (Zevounou, 2020), the relocation of research activities outside universities (Arvanitis and Hanafi, 2016), the prioritization of knowledge directly tied to social and political demands (Mouton, 2010; Das and Randeria, 2015), and, in some cases, a relegation to serving Western research as little more than subcontractors (Landau, 2012; El Refaei, 2020).
This issue of the Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines aims specifically to shift our focus to what we refer to in this call for papers as the “gray areas,” that is, the social spaces where, in wartime, the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, the forms of engagement by researchers, and the social and political uses of the humanities and social sciences are simultaneously redefined. Focusing on the Cold War U.S., historian Joy Rohde (2013) defines the “gray area” as an intermediate space between the academic world and military-state institutions, shaped by tensions between knowledge production and political demands. Here, we propose to reexamine this concept by broadening it to encompass all spaces of interaction that take shape in wartime around the encounter between social or political demands for knowledge and arrangements that mobilize the humanities and social sciences to address them. This issue aims to explore what takes place in such spaces, in all their diversity, and to situate them within a history of the humanities and social sciences that pays close attention to the trajectories, circulations, and engagements of scholars and researchers in wartime contexts.
Proposals may explore the following themes
“Gray Areas,” Social Demands, and Arrangements for Mobilizing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Wartime
Times of war see the proliferation of institutional setups and mechanisms that mobilize the social sciences and humanities and their practitioners on the margins of—or outside— established sites of knowledge production. These include expertise mechanisms within international organizations or NGOs, contract-based research programs linked to intervention policies, think tanks and consulting firms specializing in conflict analysis (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2014; Al Dassouki & Pierret, 2021), non-university research centers founded or funded by parties to the conflict (Raymond, 2019, 2026), as well as activist collectives or local initiatives that turn to researchers and produce knowledge in response to social, political, or memorial demands directly emanating from wars (Korman, 2017).
To explore the interactions created within and around such arrangements, proposals may consider the types (military, humanitarian, political, economic, activist, and/or commemorative) of demands for knowledge that emerged in the context of war, the actors formulating them, and the frameworks within which they operated. They may also examine how social science and humanities specialists were recruited, the varied forms of their involvement, the types of funding involved, cooperation among actors, as well as the effects of these arrangements on the definition of research topics and methods, the type of knowledge produced, its uses and audiences. Finally, proposals may explore whether these arrangements helped redefine the boundaries between research and expertise or between knowledge production and intervention. Were there tensions between scientific and operational imperatives? What contradictory demands or ethical dilemmas did the researchers involved face?
Mobilized Scholars, Trajectories of Engagement and Hybrid Careers
Proposals may also choose an approach centered on scientific actors and their trajectories. Who were the researchers mobilized within these institutional arrangements? What were their social and professional characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, discipline, status, etc.), and how did these characteristics shape the ways in which they did or did not operate in “gray areas”? Drawing on a rich body of literature in the history and sociology of expertise (see, for example, regarding the social sciences in times of war, Dayé, 2020, Caldari and Dal Pont Legrand, 2024), proposals may examine scholars’ legitimacy in intervening beyond the academic sphere and the ways in which legitimacy and expertise were negotiated or constructed through interactions with their audiences. Proposals may also consider how these interventions fit into professional trajectories by considering the extent to which these trajectories were shaped by limited professional mobility within the academic field (Eyal, 2002), and by exploring under what conditions these non-academic experiences may have hindered careers or, conversely, been valued in trajectories of reintegration into the academic sphere, or even in careers that end up straddling the academic sphere and other spaces.
Proposals focusing on the dynamics of mobilization and engagement among scientific actors are also welcome. Beyond researchers’ individual forms of engagement, what types of collective mobilization emerged in wartime? Did these mobilizations take place within existing organizations or rather through groups created in the context of war? Did they take different forms depending on the nature of the conflict? Were existing tensions or forms of competition among scholars carried over into “gray areas,” or did new ones emerge within them?
Proposals exploring forms of “non-engagement” (Prochasson, 1998) and demobilization will also have a place in this issue, as it aims to capture the complexity of scientists’ experiences and trajectories in contexts of war and to contribute to reflections on the different “times of scientific mobilization” (Rasmussen, 2003). How do engagement, non-engagement, or disengagement fit into the war's chronology? Did particular events—whether collective or individual, scientific or military—cause ruptures in individual biographies or collective experiences, leading them to rethink their positions?
What the Humanities and Social Sciences Owe to War
Finally, proposals may explore the feedback effects that collaborations and experiences in “gray areas” during wartime may have had on the humanities and social sciences as practiced in academic settings. To what extent did they contribute to promoting new research agendas, disseminating specific tools and methods, or circulating paradigms and concepts developed outside established disciplinary fields? Under what conditions did they sometimes lead to the institutionalization of fields of study or subdisciplines? Studies have shown that the emergence and academic institutionalization of area studies in the United States were partly due to the structuring role of government programs run by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and to the philanthropic foundations which contributed to the partial redefinition of the geography of academic research (Engerman, 2009; Lockman, 2016). In contrast, other fields of study that emerged at the initiative of governments and in response to their demand for expertise—such as terrorism studies, for example—have never become institutionalized as autonomous disciplines (Stampnitzky and Ettinger, 2013).
Beyond considering forms of institutionalization or the renewal of research topics and methods, proposals may explore the links between experiences in “gray areas” and shifts in science policies. Without delving into the issue of “restricted fieldwork”—which has already generated a vast body of literature—it would be relevant to study the opportunities for gaining access to the field that may have motivated actors to operate within these “gray areas.” Proposals may also examine the transformations of the “peoplescape of contributors to science” (Nyhart, 2016).
Submission Guidelines
The preparation of this special issue of the Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines will follow the schedule below:
December 18, 2026: deadline for submitting a proposal.
January 2027: notification to authors whose proposals have been accepted.
June 2027: online workshop to discuss article projects (consisting of a written introduction, a detailed outline and a bibliography).
December 2027: in-person workshop (Paris) to discuss pre-circulated working drafts of the articles (fully written).
March 2028: submission of articles (between 8,000 and 11,000 words, including notes and references).
Spring–Summer 2028: peer review and article revisions.
Early 2029: publication of the issue.
Proposals, in English or French, must include a title, a 300-word abstract, and a short biography (50 words). They should be submitted by December 18, 2026, to Candice Raymond (candice.raymond@cnrs.fr) and Hélène Solot (h.solot@parisnanterre.fr).
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