Peacekeeping is one of the principal activities and foreign policy tools implemented by the international community to create and “maintain international peace and security.” Peacekeeping operations have grown in size and scope since the late 1980s and have included traditional peacekeeping, multidimensional peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. Peacekeeping operations pursue far-reaching objectives ranging from humanitarian assistance and the repatriation of refugees, over the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants, to liberal democratic assistance policies.

Peacekeeping has been one of the main conflict management tools used by the international community to restore or safeguard peace and security. Since 1948, the United Nations has established 70 peace operations and has substantially evolved, adopting approaches to peace that extend beyond purely military concerns. Indeed, the promises of peacekeeping as effective instrument of conflict reduction may, to some extent, explain the evolution toward multidimensional missions and the unprecedented number of peacekeepers deployed in the last decade.

Frontline investigations with fighters against the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS), combined with multiple online studies, address willingness to fight and die in intergroup conflict. The general focus is on non-utilitarian aspects of human conflict, which combatants themselves deem ‘sacred’ or ‘spiritual’, whether secular or religious. Here we investigate two key components of a theoretical framework we call ‘the devoted actor’—sacred values and identity fusion with a group—to better understand people’s willingness to make costly sacrifices.

Drone warfare, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones” in public parlance) in military operations, goes back centuries, with heated discussions regarding the correct start date and relevant technological breakthroughs.

Considerations of violence and vulnerability are central to feminist philosophy. This is unsurprising given, not only that these are heavily gendered concepts, but also that gendered experiences of violence and vulnerability affect the lives of contemporary women and men across the world. For these reasons, feminist philosophers have wanted to address ontological, phenomenological, epistemological, and ethico-political questions about violence and vulnerability.

This special issue engages with ongoing debates on forms, possibilities and contents of European Memory. Relying on the concept of ‘entangled memory’, we develop a discursive understanding of dealing with the past in relation to the category of Europe. This interpretative frame questions explicit or implicit normative assumptions about European Memory as a way to come to terms with Europe’s conflictive historical legacies. Contributing to the third wave of memory studies, the case studies presented in this special issue shed new light on constellations of memory beyond the nation-state.

The Tanzanian general election of October 2015 seemed to mark a moment of great democratic promise. In a state that has been an enduring bastion of single-party dominance in sub-Saharan Africa, opposition parties formed a pre-electoral coalition that held until election day. They were joined by a string of high-profile defectors from the ruling CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or the Party of the Revolution) and selected the most prominent of these defectors, Edward Lowassa, as the opposition presidential candidate.