New Article by Jeffrey C. Alexander

Written By Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

We are happy to announce a new article, “The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv” by Jeffrey C Alexander in a new Journal: Dialogues in Sociology.

“This essay explores the tragic paradox that haunts ‘actually existing’ civil spheres. The civil sphere represents history’s most creative and ambitious effort to replace violence with peaceful comity and domination with democracy. Yet, the very effort to define a space of nonviolent democracy is based on a binary discourse: the motives, relations, and institutions of civil spheres can be defined only in relation to antagonistic anti-civil qualities that encourage violence and oppression. Caught inside this paradox, members of the civil sphere experience their civil communities as fragile, as continuously threatened by putatively anti-civil forces outside them. It is for this reason that actually existing civil spheres have so frequently encouraged violent wars against city states, nations, and empires outside their boundaries and repression against excluded insiders as well. After laying these contradictions out conceptually, they are explored empirically via an interpretation of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’ tragic drama that cut to the heart of Athenian democracy. After this aesthetic investigation, the essay turns to the regional and global wars of the last 100 years, examining how the debilitating national boundaries of civil spheres have, not only allowed, but encouraged destructive paroxysms of violence right up to the present day.”

Jeffrey C Alexander

Dialogues in Sociology is an academic journal dedicated to fostering critical and concept-driven debate across the field of sociology. Through an open peer commentary format, it promotes dialogue between authors and reviewers to advance theoretical and methodological innovation. The journal aims to question established paradigms, stimulate new lines of inquiry, and broaden the scope of sociological research. It invites contributions from diverse scholarly traditions and global contexts, supporting inclusive and reflexive engagement within the discipline.

Alexander, J. C. (2025). The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv. Dialogues in Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/29768667251388163

FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE HERE
Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. She is a cultural sociologist in the tradition of the Strong Program, who focuses on the meaning-making process in her research on international migration. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A., M.Phil., and PhD from Yale University. Recent books include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with Carlo Tognato and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., Palgrave, 2020) and Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), Besides civil sphere theory, her current research focuses on in-depth cultural sociological analysis and reconstruction of public issues such as perceptions of migration, and the cultural sociology of conspiracy theories.

https://www.cstnetwork.org/jaworsky-bio
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