Two Year Post-Doctoral Fellowship

Anyone want a post-doc? I got this in an email. (I am tempted to apply myself.) 

Two Year Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace

Reference number SU FV-0170-14. Deadline for applications: March 10, 2014.

The Post-Doctoral Fellow will be attached to the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace (SCEWP), which is funded by the Wallenberg Foundation and part of the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. The Centre is directed by Dr. Helen Frowe, and aims to produce cutting-edge research in the ethics of war, foster international collaboration with scholars, policy-makers and military practitioners and improve public and policy debates concerning the ethics of war and peace. The Department of Philosophy is Sweden’s largest philosophy department, and is divided into Theoretical Philosophy and Practical Philosophy. It has a thriving research community and hosts regular visiting speakers and conferences. You can find more information about the department here: www.philosophy.su.se/english.



Responsibilities


The Fellow will be expected to produce and publish high-quality research within the Centre’s remit of the ethics of war and peace. This could include (but is not limited to): humanitarian intervention, national-defence, theoretical approaches to war (such as pacifism or collectivism), terrorism, civil war, revolution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, issues within jus ad bellum and jus in bello, the moral status of combatants and non-combatants, war and technology, reconstruction and reconciliation, the notion of ‘just peace’, and legitimate authority. He or she will be expected to disseminate his or her research via international conferences. To this end, a generous research stipend is attached to the post.

The Fellow will also undertake administrative work related to the running of the Centre, such as organising conferences and undertaking editing work, and will be expected to attend and participate in the Centre’s various events. He or she may engage in some teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels. The Fellow will be expected to undertake research in English.
 Start date is negotiable, but should be no later than October 2014.

Deadline for applications is 10th March 2014. More information, including how to apply, can be found on the Philosophy department webpage here.

Call For Abstracts: Just War Theory, IPT, and the Autonomy of Politics

Got this in an email:

CFA – ECPR Conference – IPT Section – Just War Theory, IPT, and the Autonomy of Politics

Deadline for abstracts: February 10th.

The ECPR General Conference 2014 will be held in Glasgow on the 3 – 6
September. I am putting together a panel proposal for the International
Political Theory section focussing on the intersection and implications of
recent debates within the just war tradition about the principle of the
moral equality of combatants with broader debates within international
political theory about communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. In particular,
much of the revisionist just war literature, along with much cosmopolitan
theory, pushes towards the replacement of politics by philosophy, compared
to the traditional Walzerian approach to just war theory which defends the
autonomy of politics. As such the panel welcomes papers that explore the
relationship between political decisions and moral principles in the context
of these debates.

If you are interested please submit abstracts for papers (150 words max.) to
ewan.mellor@eui.eu by February 10th.

Ewan E. Mellor

PhD Candidate
Department of Social and Political Sciences
European University Institute

http://www.linkedin/in/ewanemellor
http://eui.academia.edu/ewanemellor
http://thebarbarousphilosopher.wordpress.com/

Call for papers: Emergencies and Affected Peoples: Philosophy, Policy and Practice (Birmingham, UK)

A military is often either the cause of a humanitarian disaster, say in the case of IDPs and war, and it is often part of the solution to such problems. The US military is one of the only organizations in the world with the logistical ability and resources to rapidly mobilize thousands of people and thousands of tons of supplies to anywhere in the world. Therefore, the following call for papers (that I got in an email a few days ago) should be relevant to military ethicists:

Emergencies and Affected Peoples: Philosophy, Policy and Practice - a conference for theorists and practitioners working on or toward improving the lives of those people affected by an emergency (conflict, war, humanitarian or natural disaster) - will be held in July 2014 at the University of Birmingham.

Conference Purpose: To engage theorists and practitioners in debate on the topic of informing and improving the lives of affected peoples in emergencies.

Call for Abstracts: Submission Deadline 15 February 2014

Summary:
Philosophers, academics and theorists work on global issues that affect people. Those academics who work with or even converse with practitioners, find it rewarding and consider it to be of great benefit to the outcomes of their work. Likewise, practitioners are often caught in bureaucratic cycles with crises creating unrealistic time frames for completing work let alone providing time to research new trends in theory.

The goal of both groups of professionals, however, is to aid those affected by real-world issues, in this case those affected by emergencies, broadly defined.

In an attempt to assist those who aid affected individuals, Emergencies and Affected Peoples will act as a platform for the convergence of theoretical and practical problems and thus create space for reflection and learning. Papers for Emergencies and Affected Peoples are requested which identify an affected people in an emergency situation (conflict, natural disaster, humanitarian emergency, etc.) and aim to inform a theoretical/practical conversation and thus improve theory/policy.

The conference will be arranged as a series of panels, each on a different topic. Each panel will have one theorist and one practitioner. Each panelist is requested to submit a paper suitable to their contribution in the conference. PhD students are encouraged to apply within the theorist category. Doctoral researchers from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Philosophy will act as moderators on each of the panels and will contribute to the discussion through attempts to bridge theory and practice. All proposal topics will, therefore, be considered as long as an entire panel can be found on that topic.

Questions to consider:
1. What is the emergency (conflict, natural disaster, humanitarian emergency, etc.)? Who are the affected people?
2. Why are these people particularly affected? What problem does this emergency cause for these specific people? How does the problem manifest itself?
3. How does your work contribute to improving the lives of the affected people?
4. How can we do this work together (academics and practitioners)?
Aims:

1. To improve practice and policy by discussing current trends in theoretical research.

2. To improve theoretical perspectives and research by discussing examples of practical expertise.

3. To create a forum for dialogue between practitioners and theorists.

4. To provide PGTs and PGRs with experience of working with practitioners and theorists in their field of interest thus stimulating their own research.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words by 15 February 2014 to Lauren Traczykowski lxt837@bham.ac.uklxt837@bham.ac.uk

>. Please direct questions tolxt837@bham.ac.uk

Those selected will be notified as soon as possible and will be expected to submit a full paper suitable for a 20 minute panel talk by 1 May.

The conference will be held in July at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Call for papers: The Ethics of Cyberconflicts

From an email I received:

Call for Papers for Philosophy and Technology’s special issue on The Ethics of Cyber Conflicts

GUEST EDITORS

Ludovica Glorioso (NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence)

INTRODUCTION

In the age of the so-called information revolution, the ability to control, disrupt or manipulate the enemy’s information infrastructure has become as decisive as weapon superiority with respect to determining the outcome of conflicts. So much so that the Pentagon defines cyberspace as a new domain in which war is waged, alongside land, sea, air and space.

Cyber conflicts, as part of a state’s defensive or offensive strategy, are a fast growing phenomenon, which is rapidly changing the dynamics of combat as well as the role that warfare plays in political negotiations and the life of civil societies. Such changes are not the exclusive concern of the military. They also have a significant bearing on ethicists and policymakers, since existing ethical theories of war, together with national and international regulations, struggle to address the novelties of this phenomenon. The issue could not be more pressing and there is a much felt and fast escalating need to share information and coordinate ethical theorising about cyber conflicts.

This special issue of Springer’s Philosophy & Technology (http://www.springer.com/13347) follows the organization of the international workshop on Ethics of Cyber Conflict (http://www.ccdcoe.org/428.html), held on November 21-22, 2013 at the Centro Alti Studi per la Difesa (CASD) with the support of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence.

TOPICS

We solicit the submission of papers that investigate issues concerning the way ICTs are affecting our ethical views of conflicts and warfare, as well as the analysis of just-war principles in the light of the dissemination of cyber conflicts; humanitarian military interventions based on ICTs; whether preventive acts of cyber war may satisfy jus-ad-bellum criteria; challenges of upholding jus-in-bello standards in cyber warfare, especially in asymmetric conflicts; attribution and proportionality of the response to cyber attacks; moral permissibility of automated responses and ethical deployment of military robotic weapons.

TIMETABLE

April 1, 2014: Deadline papers submissions

May 1, 2014: Deadline reviews papers

June 1, 2014: Deadline revised papers

2015: Publication of the special issue

SUBMISSION DETAILS

To submit a paper for this special issue, authors should go to the journal’s Editorial Manager http://www.editorialmanager.com/phte/

The author (or a corresponding author for each submission in case of co- authored papers) must register into EM.

The author must then select the special article type: "Special issue on ‘The Ethics of Cyber Conflicts” from the selection provided in the submission process. This is needed in order to assign the submissions to the Guest Editors.

Submissions will then be assessed according to the following procedure:

New Submission => Journal Editorial Office => Guest Editor(s) => Reviewers => Reviewers’ Recommendations => Guest Editor(s)’ Recommendation => Editor-in-Chief’s Final Decision => Author Notification of the Decision.

The process will be reiterated in case of requests for revisions.

For any further information please contact:

Ludovica Glorioso, ludovica.glorioso@ccdcoe.org

Ontologies of Conflict

From an email I received:

Ontologies of Conflict

3rd Critical Studies Research Group International Conference

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

16-17th June 2014

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in extending the understanding of conflict in both its scope and its effects; this has brought to the fore questions surrounding the relationship between conflict and ontologies. Conflict can now be understood as encompassing a broad range of phenomena, from its traditional preserve of violent confrontation, to structural or systemic violences, to the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’, and to cultural and social antagonisms. Rather than simply a negative notion, positive valences of conflict have been embraced, whether from the neoliberal logic of competition or from the post-structural valorisation of ‘dissensus’. At the same time conflict’s traditional setting - war - has undergone a transformation, the forces of globalisation prioritising time over space, catalysing rapid technological change, and resulting in a shift in the strategies of war and in the relationship between the embodied human and the new technologies of injuring.

As our understanding of conflict broadens and deepens, and the new forms of war we wage (or are exposed to) alter dominant understandings of violence and bodily destruction, what effect does this have on the nature of selfhood and the worlds in which we live? In what ways has ontology itself become a target and site of violence, state or otherwise? Can conflict be universalised, or can it only be understood in its particular relationships to gender, race, class, sexuality and disability? In what ways are our understandings of conflict framed by underpinning ontologies? When we conceptualise a world mired in violence, what ontologies do we presuppose? What ethics can we draw from an analysis of conflict? Who is the privileged ‘we’ capable of explaining the topic of ‘conflict’, one of whose effects, it could be argued, is the very interruption and deconstruction of explanatory frameworks?

Topics for discussion and presentation might include, but are not limited to, the following:

Structural violence and the transformation of the self/world.

Language and conflict: is language itself inherently, inexorably, violent?

The relationship between the global and the local in conflict.

Past, present and future paradigms underpinning the logic of conflicts.

Ontology in time and space: contexts and scenarios for an ontology of conflict.

Empathy, technology and the politics of (dis)embodied violence.

Conflict and/as the political.

Memory, narrative and the transformation of conflict.

Conflict and the (re)construction of selves.

The conference is interdisciplinary in its scope, and is particularly (but not exclusively) aimed at postgraduate colleagues working in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The conference fee will be £60 (waged), £20 (unwaged / student).

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 31st March.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.

Army wants to replace grunts with robots

. . . this has got to have an impact on military ethics.

Military Medical Ethics Workshop

Invitation to the 4th Workshop on Military Medical Ethics of the International Committee of Military Medicine (ICMM)

For the fourth time, the ICMM Reference Centre for Education in IHL and Ethics together with the Medical Services Directorate of the Swiss Armed Forces and the Center for Ethics of Zurich University organise their annual Workshop on Military Medical Ethics. The main topics for the 2014 workshop are resource allocation, disaster bioethics, and e-learning in military medical ethics and IHL.

The idea of this workshop series is to bring experts and interested people from the relevant academic disciplines and the practice together and to offer a neutral, international platform to discuss medical ethical dilemmas that are encountered by medical troops and humanitarian forces in deployment. Switzerland with its tradition of neutrality and support of Humanitarian Law is very pleased to offer a workshop where specialists in Law of Armed Conflict, military medical professionals, philosophers and members of the ICRC are meeting to analyse, discuss and deliberate various ethical dilemmas of military medicine.

The results of the workshop are being published in annual proceedings.

We invite all interested people and specialists from the fields of Ethics, International Law, and the Military to participate in this workshop, which is taking place at the shores of the beautiful lake “Bodensee”, near Zurich
from April 24th to April 26th 2014. You will find the workshop programme and the application form on our website http://melac.ch/courses-workshops/ethics-workshop/2014-lilienberg

For further information or any questions related to the workshop our your participation do not hesitate to contact Dr. Daniel Messelken at messelken@ethik.uzh.ch

ICMM Reference Centre for Education of IHL and Ethics - http://www.melac.ch/

Philosophy of death and dying

Here is a call for papers on the philosophy of death and dying. It is very reminiscent (too reminiscent, I think) to this conference. I will repeat the comments I made about a month ago when I read of the latter conference:

I am somewhat struck by the lack of reference to war and soldiers. Soldiers are people who spend an inordinate amount of time 1) learning how to take lives and 2) learning how to prevent their own deaths. You would think, and you would be right, that much philosophical ink has been spilled on this. Their philosophical reflections should be reflected in the canon too.