Following a highly successful International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts conference held in Washington, DC in September last year, we are now extending an invitation for submissions of articles on the conference’s broad theme of ‘Strikes and Social Conflicts in Hostile Environments’ (see below) for publication in our journal Workers of the World later in 2026.

Strikes and Social Conflicts in Hostile Environments

While workers and other subordinate groups are always operating under conditions that limit their range of action—that is, circumscribing the kinds of protest demands or action repertoires that are considered normative or acceptable—there are historical periods and geographical spaces in which the environment is especially hostile to collective action from below.

Our premise is that we have entered one of these especially hostile periods on a global scale. As such, there is an urgent need to examine and draw lessons from instances (both contemporary and historical) in which subordinated groups navigated through, organised in, protested against, and at times, successfully transformed the ‘hostile environments’ in which they were embedded.

Historically, many would point to the labour repressive colonial regimes and the spread of fascist movements in the first half of the twentieth century as one example of a period of widening/deepening ‘hostility’ on a global scale. Likewise, the early-twenty-first century, with the current global resurgence of fascist and far right regimes and movements in new forms, can be understood as another period of widening/deepening hostility.

At the same time, spatial unevenness of hostile environments has been central to the functioning of historical capitalism in any given period. For example, in the decades after the Second World War, the apartheid regime in South Africa and military dictatorships in Latin America and East Asia existed at the same time that the right of workers to strike and form independent trade unions were at their height in many core countries. Equally important, workers in the same location (e.g., within the same country, city, workplace) are regularly divided between those who are ruled through consent and those who feel the brunt of the hostility—with distinctions drawn along the lines of gender, migration/citizenship, race/ethnicity, urban/rural, etc.

Finally, even in the darkest periods in world history, there have been local pockets of hope in which successful mobilisations around (and advances of) labour rights and social justice have prevailed. Here we might think of the settlements established by enslaved people who had escaped from bondage (marronage); or Rojava, the autonomous polyethnic socialist regime established in (12/16/2024) northeast Syria in the midst of the Syrian Civil War; or the experiences of other liberated areas in the midst of wars and revolutions.