We invite historians and history educators to submit individual or co-written pieces for the eighth issue of the journal “War and Remembrance”.
The theme of this issue will be: moral alienation and emotions during wars and conflicts.
How are we supposed to talk about war and its perpetrators when their role is becoming increasingly blurry? How to study and portray wartime emotions – fleeting, borderline, often difficult to express – in order to capture their significance for understanding both war itself and the memory of war?
War experiences radically shape the boundaries of human morals and emotions. The methods of warfare are making moral responsibility more and more relative, partially lessening one’s psychological burden. The invention of the bow began an ongoing process of reducing personal responsibility for causing death, a process influenced by technology, and later also by bureaucracy, ideology and dehumanisation.
In the 20th century, both of these processes the diffusion of personal responsibility and the rise of collective emotions – became especially pronounced. In this context, the technological and systemic distancing from the act of taking life comes to the fore: from mass bombing of cities, through mechanised and industrialised killing, to nuclear weapons and the development of remote warfare and, finally, the rise of autonomous systems. Such evolution of warfare disperses the responsibility for violence between the doer, the commander, the technology and the system, allowing the perpetrator to vanish behind machinery, procedures and codes.
In the 21st century, the dilution of responsibility has clearly progressed, and it manifests itself dramatically during the war in Ukraine. This process becomes even more evident when modern technologies – such as drones, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare – are coupled with conventional violence, and the experience of war takes on new, hybrid forms.
From the very beginning, emotions were an integral part of any war – from fear and trauma, through elation, ecstasy and a sense of community, to complete indifference; those emotions have influenced both individual experiences and collective rituals of remembrance. They have affected individual and collective feelings shaping local bonds, or have been used to impose created historical narratives.
We encourage submissions on history (primarily concerning World War II, the 20th century and other major modern conflicts), museology (exhibition practices, narratives of memory, museum education), and those adopting interdisciplinary approach (anthropology, philosophy, history of ideas, studies of emotions and memory).
The following topics of interest will be particularly appreciated:
– the erosion of accountability on the battlefield and the shift towards technology and systems;
– the consequences of this phenomenon for collective memory and museum commemoration;
– the ‘moral alienation’ in warfare, in the context of the 20th century and World War II;
– the responsibility for violence in the age of modern warfare technology (airpower, weapons of mass destruction, remote-controlled systems);
– the emotional impact of combat and war experience;
– the relationship between the memory of war and the emotions and accountability;
– the portrayal of war emotions and accountability by museums and memorial sites’.
Do not hesitate to venture beyond the 20th century – we welcome analyses relating to contemporary armed conflicts such as the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Palestine, which highlight the further development and dramatic nature of the phenomena mentioned above.
We accept submissions in Polish or in international languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian) until 31 January 2026.
Please send the materials (text, abstract, keywords, biography, ORCID number, bibliography and completed and signed author’s statement) to: redakcjawip@muzeum1939.pl.
The text limit is 60,000 characters for articles and source materials, including spaces and footnotes, and 40,000 characters for reviews and reports.