Author Close Encounters in War Journal

Book review: “L’urlo di Ecuba. Donne contro la guerra nell’antica Grecia e oggi”, by Vittoria Longoni

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By Maria Arpaia

The book L’Urlo di Ecuba (Hecuba’s Cry) is a publication designed to reach a wider audience, aimed at establishing a continuity between ancient and modern suffering in the face of the universally shared horror of war.

Starting from the assumption that there is a substantial overlap between the past and the present in terms of the methods and strategies of warfare – starvation, slavery, and human rights abuses are common denominators of all wars – the book examines female figures from mythology in search of a consistent parallel with the contemporary world. The analysis focuses entirely on women, who have always been the primary victims of war: objectified, oppressed, and raped, yet at times also leading figures in movements to raise awareness and speak against injustice.

This book is intended as a tribute to women’s resilience: even in war zones where their role is socially marginalised, women journalists and activists manage to make their voices heard in denouncing injustices and to awaken public conscience.

The structure of the book is repetitive and methodical: each chapter examines a different female figure from ancient mythology (Andromache, Antigone, Hecuba, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Polyxena, etc.), whose story is recounted using literary sources – from epic poetry (the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Cycle) to the tragic and comic theatre of 5th-century BC Athens, with some reference to historians…

Read the full review HERE.

“Anthem for Doomed Ecosystems: The Emergence of Eco-War Poetry”. A review of the book “Convergence. Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War”, ed. by Anne Coray, J.C. Todd and Teresa Mei Chuc, Oakland, Scarlet Tanager Books, 2026

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By Sarah Montin

What happens when war and environmental catastrophe are no longer considered separately? Published in May 2026 and co-edited by poets Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd, Convergence, Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War responds by bringing together war poetry and ecopoetry in the first anthology of its kind.  At a moment when armed conflict and ecological devastation are increasingly experienced as interconnected realities rather than discrete crises, this publication appears particularly timely and necessary.

[…]

The choice of the striking, single Latinate word “convergence” for the anthology’s title serves to counteract the widely-used and euphemistic “collateral”, often applied to environmental degradation in military context. Bringing to mind the French militant concept “convergence des luttes” (“the convergence of struggles”), the title invites us to adopt a non-human perspective as ecological and military crises converge. However, as Anne Coray warns in her introduction – “our intent in this anthology is not to minimize the human toll of war but to expand the dialogue” (p. xv) –, the focus on environmental damage does not set aside the human devastation of war: it only seeks to amplify it by redirecting the reader’s gaze. Quite understandably, the tradition of war writing has engaged almost exclusively with representing the human experience and cost of war, sidelining the environment, most often represented as an omnipresent but invisible backdrop to human suffering…

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The Italian Federation of Surgeons and Dentists releases the Manifesto “Doctors and Peace”

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By the Editors

The Italian Federation of Surgeons and Dentists (Federazione nazionale degli Ordini dei Medici Chirurghi e degli Odontoiatri) has published the Manifesto “Doctors and Peace” (Medici e Pace) during the Symposium Curare senza paura, which was held in Perugia on March, 12.

The Italian Manifesto appeared a few days after the European Council of Medical Orders (CEOM) released the statement Ethical and deontological issues in times of conflict.

The Italian Manifesto claims that health is a universal right that should be granted to everyone, for the equal distribution of medical services is a fundamental contribution to peace and fraternity.

The Close Encounters in War Journal salutes the initiative as an ethical response to the growing political instability that is triggering wars and causing suffering on a global scale.

“The Night of the Orange Light”: A Testimony from the Middle East

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By Shalindri Peiris

Rockets in the night sky in a picture taken by the author

It happened again. Less than a year later, I stood in the exact same spot and counted, through the window, the orange lights moving steadily toward me. They streaked across the sky with terrifying purpose. It is almost ironic that I grew up in a country ravaged by civil war for three decades and never once heard the sound of a bomb, yet here I was, feeling the walls tremble around me. The attempt to flee felt laughable from the very beginning.

All we could do was grip our packed bags and stand on the doorstep, praying to every god we knew that the orange lights slicing through the sky would not fall on us…

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Call for Articles. Issue n. 9 (2026): Against War. Conflict Resolution, Peace, and Nonviolence

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The Editors of the Close Encounters in War Journal announce that the call for articles for Issue n. 9 (2026) is now open.

Issue n. 9 of the CEIWJ aims to investigate the interdependence of war and peace from the perspective of close encounters. The editors invite the submission of articles investigating the idea of peace, broadly understood, to include the absence of war but also being against war from a vast spectrum of theoretical and critical perspectives in the fields of Cultural History, Memory Studies, Modern Languages, Oral History, Philosophy of Language, Postcolonial Studies, Psychology, Religion, Social Sciences, Ethics, Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, Gender Studies, History of Art, History of Ideas, Curriculum Studies, Linguistics, and Trauma Studies.

The editors encourage the blending of different approaches. Contributions from established scholars, early-career researchers, doctoral students, and practitioners will be considered. Case studies that include different geographic areas and non-Western contexts are warmly welcome.

The editors of the CEIWJ invite the submission of abstracts of 250 words in English by 1 March 2026 to ceiwj@nutorevelli.org. The authors invited to submit their works will be required to send articles of 8,000-10,000 words (endnotes included, bibliographical references not included in word count), in English by 20 May 2026. All articles will undergo a process of double-blind peer review. We will notify you of the results of the review in September 2026. Final versions of revised articles will be submitted in autumn 2026. All manuscripts must adhere to the Journal’s style-sheet available at  https://closeencountersinwar.org/instruction-for-authors-submissions/.

Download the Call for Articles in PDF

“Boots”. A short story by DC Diamondopolous

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Common Creatives CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The same sun scorched downtown Los Angeles that had seared the Iraq desert. Army Private First Class Samantha Cummings stood at attention holding a stack of boxes, her  unwashed black hair slicked back in a ponytail and knotted military style. She stared out from Roberts Shoe Store onto Broadway, transfixed by a homeless man with hair and scraggly beard the color of ripe tomatoes. She’d only seen that hair color once before, on Staff Sergeant Daniel O’Conner.

      The man pushed his life in a shopping cart crammed with rags and stuffed trash bags. He glanced at Sam through the storefront window, his bloated face layered with dirt. His eyes had the meander of drink in them.

      Sam hoped hers didn’t. Since her return from Bagdad a year ago, her craving for alcohol sneaked up on her like an insurgent. Bathing took effort. She ate to exist. Friends disappeared. Her life started to look like the crusted bottom of her shot glass.

      The morning hangover began its retreat to the back of her head.

      The homeless man vanished down Broadway. She carried the boxes to the storeroom.

      In 2012, Sam passed as an everywoman: white, black, brown, Asian. She was a coffee colored Frappuccino. Frap. That’s what the soldiers nicknamed her. Her mother conceived her while on ecstasy during the days of big hair and shoulder pads. On Sam’s eighteenth birthday, she enlisted in the Army. She wanted a job and an education. But most of all she wanted to be part of a family…

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“Lioness”. Flash Fiction

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By Scott Rye

It wasn’t so much that Betty Lynn Campbell was pretty. She wasn’t. But there was something about her. On her best days, she bore a slight resemblance to a young Meryl Streep. Probably the Polish genes inherited from her mother. No, Betty Lynn wasn’t pretty. What she was, though, was a dude magnet. She was never going to be Homecoming Queen, but she was popular with the football players. Slut? Whore? Easy? Nobody ever used those words, exactly, when describing Betty Lynn. “Animal magnetism”, maybe. That’s what she had, they said. And it was true that she seemed to exude some sort of literal magnetism: Betty Lynn was unable to wear a watch because it would stop working within a day or two of putting it on. Doctors were at a loss to explain the phenomenon…

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Book Review: “The European Art Market and the First World War. Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910-1925” by Maddalena Alvi, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025

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By Gianluca Cinelli

The relationship between art and the First World War is often looked at by focusing on how the conflict encouraged the emergence of novel and original subjects and styles, both in literature and the arts. However, the aesthetic aspects only reveal one aspect of the relationship between armed conflicts and artistic activity. Maddalena Alvi, a young scholar at the University of Manchester, approached this topic from a different perspective. Instead of considering how the conflict affected the poetics and creativity of European artists, Alvi focuses on the art market, thus shifting the axis of the investigation to the field of cultural economy. This phrase means that culture, including art and its market, is part of the economic life of societies, and as such, it played a paramount role in the war economy between 1914 and 1918. Alvi’s book, therefore, focuses on the cultural and ideological implications of trading art in Europe between 1910 and 1925.

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