World War III? Politics, Perception, and the Future of Global Order

Few ideas have re-entered political language as forcefully as World War III. The war in Ukraine, the escalation in the Middle East, including the use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran and the subsequent Iranian retaliation across the region, rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, renewed nuclear anxiety, and the spread of cyber and information warfare have all strengthened the sense that international politics is again vulnerable to cascading crises. Sanctions, energy insecurity, technological rivalry, and democratic polarization have added to that perception of systemic strain. References to World War III now appear across scholarship, journalism, and political speech, while some authors also invoke World War IV to describe a further stage or transformed condition of global confrontation. Political science has rich literatures on war, democracy, communication, and governance, but these conversations rarely meet in one place.This Research Topic brings those conversations together. It invites work that treats World War III not only as a strategic scenario but also as a political object: a warning, an analogy, a fear, a narrative of order and disorder, and a test of institutional restraint. We seek contributions that explain how expectations of catastrophic war are formed, who circulates them, how they shape democratic life, and which political and legal arrangements may still limit escalation. The ambition is to create a forum in which conflict studies, political communication, democratic theory, and international political economy speak to the same problem rather than past one another.We welcome submissions from international relations, comparative politics, political communication, public policy, democratic theory, international political economy, legal studies, peace and conflict studies, and neighboring fields. Relevant themes include escalation dynamics, deterrence, alliance politics, nuclear risk, regional flashpoints, cyber conflict, sanctions, war rhetoric, media framing, misinformation, public opinion, democratic accountability, emergency powers, civil liberties, historical analogy, crisis governance, and competing visions of global order. We encourage original research articles, review articles, theoretical interventions, comparative case studies, discourse analyses, survey-based studies, and mixed-method contributions. Papers need not argue that World War III is imminent. Strong submissions may instead examine how the language of World War III, and in some cases World War IV, is mobilized, resisted, measured, or translated into policy. Topic editors: Dimos Chatzinikolaou, Prof. Badar Alam Iqbal Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80286/world-war-iii-politics-perception-and-the-future-of-global-order