A field is born

A field is born


Digital War



The Journal of Digital War will be published three times a year by Palgrave Springer and the call for submissions will go live in Spring 2019.


This is an emerging field whose importance is increasingly recognised and which have had a significant impact upon all aspects of contemporary politics, society and culture. It is a field that is global in nature, highly sensitive to contemporary developments and interested in ongoing technological changes and their impact.

In recent years: Wikileaks brought us a new vision of our ongoing wars; popular and academic books on drones and cyberwar began to appear; lethal, autonomous robotics began to be publicly debated and a growing awareness of the revolutionary impact of social media in conflict-zones spread. Topics such as hacking, hacktivism, digital civil-wars and government surveillance came to the fore; the success of Islamic State meant everyone was discussing online terrorism and propaganda; wars across the world play out now on social media platforms and people’s smartphones with participation from increasingly indistinct militaries, citizens, states, and new developments in military A.I., simulation, augmentation and weaponry made the news. Soon, everyone became conversant with the subject of cyberwar and nation-state and hacking group cyberattacks, and discussions of 4chan, trolling, the weaponization of Facebook, Twitter-bots, Troll-Farms, and Russian information war became common.

This journal thus sees digital war as having gone mainstream.

Digital War will be A4 in format and will include a significant number of original images.

Key intersecting subjects:

  • Media and Journalism: digital war reporting, photojournalism and film-making; social media and war, including their use by governments, militaries, soldiers and civilians; the role of technologies such as the smartphone and apps; the public experience of and participation in warfare; Wikileaks and leaking; fake news (intentional and unintentional spreading); digital imagery and graphics.

  • Military Technologies: digital technologies, systems and weaponry; drones (and other unmanned systems); Cyberwar; Informational warfare, propaganda, and Psyops; electronic warfare; intelligence and counter-insurgency (COIN); military use of simulations, virtual reality and augmented reality; wearable technologies, cyborg enhancements and ‘smart’ weaponry; posthumanism; artificial intelligence (A.I.); robotics and lethal autonomous systems; and other emergent technologies with military implications such as nanotechnology.

  • Art: political, aesthetic, critical, legal, ethical, experimental, algorithmic and multimedia interventions in war and conflict.

  • War Studies: including the theorization of war and position papers on contemporary war and the future of warfare and its challenges, including training, preparedness and doctrine.

  • Politics and IR: key issues around terrorism and digital technologies; surveillance and preventative measures; cybersecurity and the critical infrastructure; digital civil wars and protests; the role of hackers and ‘hacktivist’ groups such as Anonymous; ‘weaponization’, namely that transformed from something that has no prior political-military purpose; 4chan, trolling and emergence of political troll-warfare.

  • Social and Cultural Studies: popular representation of digital war in videogames and science-fiction; politics of the digital versus the politics of the analogue; the means of connection/disconnection between digital and non or extra digitalized practices of warfare.

  • Geography: regional issues around warfare; global war; spatial experience and control; the temporalities of warfare; decolonial/digital coloniality debates.

  • Law: Representations of conflict within the legal frameworks of international law; new forms of evidence gathering and war crime documentation; human rights; forensic architecture.

  • Memory and History: issues around digitalisation; digital and organizational remembering and forgetting; education; museums and the archives of war; digital curation; battlefield archaeology; military and public records; commemoration and memorialization in videogames and interactive media, and access and searching.

  • Media Archaeology: the historical and material genealogy of the digital in previous mediatic platforms and power/knowledge apparatuses.