Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Rising global and regional political tensions, interstate conflict, and growing competition over critical resources increasingly shape the conditions under which organizations operate (Lumineau & Keller, 2025; Oh & Shin, 2025). Across geographical areas, organizational action is ever more conditioned by armed groups, informal authorities, and hybrid governance arrangements, which affect access to markets, infrastructure, labor, and security (Belhoste & Dimitrova, 2025; Miklian & Katsos, 2025). At the same time, political complexity and contestation now permeate global value chains in more visible ways, as sanctions, resource dependencies, and shifting alliances expose organizations to new forms of uncertainty and pressure (Ali et al., 2025). Digital infrastructures further blur the boundaries between economic, civilian, and military spheres, making firms and other organizations both more vulnerable to conflict-related risks and often more implicated in their management (Abels, 2024; Jacobsen & Liebetrau, 2025). Taken together, these dynamics reveal the growing entanglement of organizational behavior with geopolitical forces, security concerns, conflict dynamics, and shifting power relations, and raise urgent questions about the roles organizations may play in shaping prospects for peace or conflict.

Research on business, peace, and conflict has expanded in recent years, highlighting both opportunities and risks of organizational engagement in conflict-affected physical and digital settings. Work in this stream (Ganson et al., 2022; Joseph et al., 2025) shows that firms may support peace and resilience, yet may also reproduce inequalities or unintentionally reinforce conflict drivers. Earlier studies emphasize relational embeddedness and inclusive governance as central to constructive engagement in conflict-affected settings (Joseph & Van Buren III, 2022; Kolk & Lenfant, 2015), while scholarship on organizations in fragile environments further suggests how institutional complexity and persistent power asymmetries shape the conditions under which such engagement unfolds (Hällgren et al., 2018). Such strands of work underscore the need for deeper theorization at the intersection of organizing, conflict and peace, and geopolitics.

Organization and political studies offer powerful lenses for advancing this work (Melin et al., 2023; Meyer & Quattrone, 2023). Systems and complexity approaches help trace how peace and violence may emerge from interdependent, multilevel processes (Cechvala & Ganson, 2024; Mair & Seelos, 2021). Institutional theory offers tools to examine how commercial, humanitarian, political, and security logics intersect, compete, or become blended in ways that shape organizational behavior, legitimacy, and responsibility (Joseph et al., 2024; Westermann-Behaylo, 2009). Research on negotiation and cooperation (Maas et al., 2013; Siedel, 2007) highlights the possibilities for bridging adversarial histories, and critical perspectives draw attention to how power, inequality, and contested narratives might condition organizational engagement in conflict settings and dynamics (Ben-Porat, 2005; Ben-Shmuel, 2025).

This sub-theme invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that examine how organizations—businesses, NGOs, multilateral institutions, social movements, and hybrid ventures—organize for peace and stability in contexts shaped by geopolitical pressures, conflict legacies, and security concerns. We welcome research that examines the micro-level processes and practices through which actors make sense of conflict, responsibility, risk, and possible courses of action, including identity work, emotions, relational repair, and boundary spanning. We also encourage work on meso-level arrangements and dynamics, such as governance, institutional work, nonmarket strategy, and cross-sector collaboration, through which organizations negotiate legitimacy, coordinate across divides, and respond to fragmented authority. At the macro level, contributions may examine how broader structures and conditions – including sanctions regimes, resource dependencies, global value chains, and geopolitical competition – shape organizational agency and constrain or enable efforts toward stability and peace. Work connecting these levels is especially encouraged, particularly where it shows how everyday organizational practices become linked to wider institutional, political, conflict, or peace dynamics.    

Building peace is also temporal and institutional work. Organizations that orient toward peace operate across long horizons, at times without visible progress, holding open possibilities of futures that may take decades to materialize (Rauch, 2025; Reinecke & Lawrence, 2023). They engage in the ongoing stabilization of fragile arrangements, the maintenance of cooperation across cycles of escalation, and the institutional endurance of peace-oriented practices in hostile environments. We welcome contributions that examine peace as a process requiring ongoing organizational labor, including the temporal work of sustaining commitment when peace is deferred, contested, or reversed.

Methodological reflections are also invited. Research in conflict-affected or politically sensitive environments raises distinctive challenges related to ethics, safety, positionality, access, and the protection of participants and researchers (Frenkel, 2023; Wood, 2006). It also requires sensitivity to silence, fear, trauma, and the uneven visibility of actors and events, as well as to the risks of producing knowledge that may expose vulnerable groups or reinforce contested narratives (Fujii, 2010; Krause, 2021). Longitudinal, multimethod, participatory, or embedded approaches may be valuable for capturing how organizational action, relationships, and conflict dynamics unfold. Yet such approaches remain difficult to design and sustain, especially where trust is fragile, field access is restricted, and conditions change rapidly. We therefore welcome contributions that reflect on methodological innovation and the craft of studying organizing amid conflict and geopolitical pressure.

Aligned with the 2027 colloquium theme “The Games We Play” and building on the call to engage more directly with politics and the darker sides of organizational life, this sub-theme builds on EGOS’s longstanding interest in institutional complexity, field-level change, and societal challenges by foregrounding the strategic, relational, and symbolic “games” through which organizations navigate conflict-affected environments. These games, ranging from everyday interactions to cross-sector negotiations and field-level maneuvering, operate as      power plays, including      efforts to claim legitimacy, secure access, manage dependence, resist coercion, or influence the rules of engagement. Not all games are adversarial. Some are cooperative, generative, or repair-oriented, as actors build fragile coalitions, mend broken relationships, and construct shared institutions across divides. As they intersect with the actions of states, armed actors, communities, NGOs, and other organizations, they can accumulate into broader dynamics that shape prospects for cooperation, stability, or escalation. By taking such dynamics seriously, we encourage work that examines how organizational action may contribute to, constrain, or transform possibilities for peace.

Questions that may guide contributions include:

• How do organizations construct or contest the boundaries of responsibility when their actions are entangled with conflict dynamics?

• How do power asymmetries among firms, states, armed actors, and local communities shape organizational agency, responsibility, and constraint in contexts of conflict and geopolitical pressure?

• What roles do multilateral institutions, social movements, faith-based organizations, and grassroots collectives play in organizing for peace, alongside or in tension with private-sector actors?

• When do business activities support peace, resilience, or social cohesion, and when do they reproduce fragility or exclusion?

• How do organizations navigate competing commercial, political, humanitarian, and security logics in conflict-affected environments?

• How do identity, emotions, and relational work influence conflict transformation?    

• What forms of cross-divide collaboration, repair, and reconciliation become organizationally feasible under geopolitical pressure, and what conditions enable or close them off?     

• How do systemic feedback loops and unintended consequences arise from organizational interventions?

• How do cross-sector collaborations form or break down when legitimacy and safety are contested?    

• What everyday organizational practices, routines, or rituals contribute to building and stabilizing peace, and what institutional, temporal, and relational work holds fragile peace arrangements in place?

• How do peace-oriented organizations sustain commitment and revise idealized futures of peace across long horizons, repeated setbacks, and the mundane realities of slow or invisible progress?

• What new concepts or theoretical vocabularies are needed to account for organizing under coercion, fragmented authority, and geopolitical pressure?

• How can researchers study conflict-affected and violence-exposed settings in ways that are ethically responsible and attentive to risks for participants and researchers?

• What methodological designs, forms of evidence, or modes of engagement are needed to capture the unfolding and often hidden dynamics of organizing amid conflict and violence?

• ​Abels, J. (2024). Private infrastructure in geopolitical conflicts: The case of Starlink and the war in Ukraine. European Journal of International Relations, 30(4), 842–866. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241260653
• Ali, I., Ho, W., & Papadopoulos, T. (Eds.). (2025). Global value chains and geopolitical uncertainty: Disruption and transformation. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003468899
• Belhoste, N., & Dimitrova, A. (2025). Downward spiral of firms’ political strategies in conflict zones: A process analysis of an MNE’s operations during an active civil war. Journal of World Business, 60(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2025.101640
• Ben-Porat, G. (2005). Between power and hegemony: Business communities in peace processes. Review of International Studies, 31(2), 325–348. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210505006479
• Ben-Shmuel, A.T. (2025). What Counts as Environmental Work? How Gender Regimes Shape Organizational Practice. Organization & Environment.      https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266261433103
• Cechvala, S., & Ganson, B. (2024). Systems perspectives on business and peace: The contingent nature of business-related action with respect to peace positive impacts. Journal of Business Ethics, 194(3), 523–544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05593-9
• Ganson, B., He, T. L., & Henisz, W. J. (2022). Business and peace: The impact of firm–stakeholder relational strategies on conflict risk. Academy of Management Review, 47(2), 259–281. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0411
• Fujii, L. A. (2010). Shades of truth and lies: Interpreting testimonies of war and violence. Journal of Peace Research, 47(2), 231–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343309353097
• Frenkel, M. (2023). Organizing, researching, and writing about peacebuilding from the ‘wrong’side of the conflict. Organization Studies, 44(2), 304-307. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221131936
• Hällgren, M., Rouleau, L., & De Rond, M. (2018). A matter of life or death: How extreme context research matters for management and organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 111–153. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0017
• Jacobsen, J. T., & Liebetrau, T. (2025). Infrastructuring public-private relations: Big Tech, the Ukraine War and implications to security governance. European Journal of International Relations, 32(1), 183–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661251370265
• Joseph, J., Maon, F., & Berti, M. (2024). Organizing for peace: The organizational behaviors of business amid conflict. Business Horizons, 67(6), 699–710. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2024.07.009
• Joseph, J., Maon, F., Uribe-Jaramillo, M. T., Katsos, J. E., & Lindgreen, A. (2025). Business, conflict, and peace: A systematic literature review and conceptual framework. Journal of Management Studies, 62(4), 1779–1810. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13139
• Joseph, J., & Van Buren, H., III. (2022). Entrepreneurship, conflict, and peace: The role of inclusion and value creation. Business & Society, 61(6), 1558–1593. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211040
• Kolk, A., & Lenfant, F. (2015). Partnerships for peace and development in fragile states: Identifying missing links. Academy of Management Perspectives, 29(4), 422–437. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2013.0122
• Krause, J. (2021). The ethics of ethnographic methods in conflict zones. Journal of Peace Research, 58(3), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343320971021
• Lumineau, F., & Keller, A. (2025). War as a phenomenon of inquiry in management studies. Journal of Management Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13213
• Maas, A., Carius, A., & Wittich, A. (2013). From conflict to cooperation? Environmental cooperation as a tool for peace-building. In R. Floyd & R. Matthew (Eds.), Environmental security: Approaches and issues (pp. 102–120). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203108635
• Mair, J., & Seelos, C. (2021). Organizations, social problems, and system change: Invigorating the third mandate of organizational research. Organization Theory, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211054858
• Melin, M. M., Sosa, S., Velez-Calle, A., & Montiel, I. (2023). War and international business: Insights from political science. AIB Insights, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.46697/001c.68323
• Meyer, R. E., & Quattrone, P. (2023). Reflections on organizing in/for peace and war times. Organization Studies, 44(2), 299–300. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221131413
• Miklian, J., & Katsos, J. (2025). Crisis: A global case primer. BridgeBuilder Books.
• Oh, C. H., & Shin, J. (2025). Clash of the titans: Conflict intensity, community dependence on environmental resources, and stakeholder multiplicity. Journal of Management Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13264
• Rauch, M. (2025). Between war and peace: How boredom shapes the enactment of idealized futures in extreme contexts. Academy of Management Journal, 68(3), 475-506. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0618
• Reinecke, J., & Lawrence, T. B. (2023). The role of temporality in institutional stabilization: A process view. Academy of Management Review, 48(4), 639-658. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0486
• Siedel, G. J. (2007). The role of business deal making and dispute resolution in contributing to sustainable peace. American Business Law Journal, 44(2), 379–389. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1714.2007.00041.x
• Westermann-Behaylo, M. (2009). Institutionalizing peace through commerce: Engagement or divestment in South Africa and Sudan. Journal of Business Ethics, 89(S4), 417–434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-010-0398-0
• Wood, E. J. (2006). The ethical challenges of field research in conflict zones. Qualitative Sociology, 29(3), 373–386. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-006-9027-8