Call for Abstracts: "Technology assessment and future warfare: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

2025-02-20

Please read the complete CfA (PDF) here.

Background: Technology assessment (TA) as a research discipline is, like so many other devel-opments, to some extent a child of war. Modern operations research was developed shortly before and during World War II. Game theory, scenario building, and simulation methods have their origins in the Cold War era and were used to support decision making under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and a lack of information and to formulate plausible futures (for an intro-duction and critique, see Rapoport 1964). Herman Kahn, whose books “On Thermonuclear War” (Kahn 1961) and “On Escalation” (Kahn 1965) contributed significantly to the develop-ment of strategies for a winnable nuclear war in the U.S., is particularly famous – some would say infamous – in this context.
Many people may find this way of thinking irritating, including some who deal with technology assessment professionally. At the same time, however, it has to be noted that studying the consequences of war in general, and of nuclear war in particular, was a regular part of the work of the Office for Technology Assessment (OTA) (see the OTA Archive, https://ota.fas.org). Today, however, interest in such issues in TA no longer seems to be as strong. For example, searching the Web of Science for “‘technology assessment’ and warfare” across all search fields returns four texts, while a search for “forecast and warfare” returns 96 texts, but many of them do not fit the topic properly, as they deal, for instance, with the “war” against COVID-19 and other topics not related to TA. Even on the web pages of ITAS, TAB, or EPTA, there are only very few entries related to “war” or “warfare.” Of course, this is a rather weak indicator for the relevance of war in TA – a search on Google Scholar actually yields more hits. But even the sources found there have, on closer inspection, often little to do with war in the narrower sense and TA, or relate only marginally to war itself.
Although many of the methods used and the topics dealt with in the early days of institution-alized TA were closely linked to the effects of certain weapons or the likely impacts of a nuclear war, the topic is apparently rarely discussed at conferences, in projects, or in TA publications. The question is why this is the case, and it therefore shall be explored in this TATuP Special topic.

 

Special topic guest editors

How to submit

  • We recommend the submission of manuscripts in English (US), but German versions are also welcome.
  • Please submit your abstract by 11 April 2025 at the latest via e-mail to redaktion@tatup.de.
  • Length of the abstract: max. 1.5 pages.
  • The editorial office will contact the author submitting the abstract.
  • Please state full names, e-mail addresses, and institutional affiliations of all co-authors.

Editorial process outline:

  • 11 April 2025: Submit your abstract
  • May 2025: Notification of invitation or rejection to submit research articles
  • August 2025: Submit your research articles, followed by peer review
  • October 2025: Feedback from the reviewers, followed by revision by the authors
  • November 2025: Submission of the revised research articles
  • December 2025: Further revisions, if necessary
  • February 2026: Data transfer to publishing house
  • March 2026: Publication (print and online)

 

TATuP - Journal for Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice is the international and peer reviewed open access journal for the interdisciplinary field of technology assessment and neighboring fields of research.