Abstract
In an Editorial that accompanied the March 2018 issue of volume 24, we as the new Editors of the EJIR presented our editorial vision and policies to the established readership of the journal as the editorship moved from Sussex to Amsterdam. The vision was based on the substance of our bid as a team to lead the EJIR for the four years to come. We argued that all great journals evolve and change over time, and that so they should. That is why we rotate editorial teams on a regular, transparent, and competitive basis. Our commitment to the ‘broad IR’ and European mandate of the journal’s founders meant that we did not expect dramatic changes, but change we argued ought to follow from a new Editorial team. We hoped to function as midwives of new developments in empirical research and their conceptualisation, and to foster theory-driven coverage of the field of IR for academics and beyond. Our commitment was to open and transparent editorial practices, bringing out the best in the peer review system, realising the highest professional standards and helping our authors to produce the best scholarship of which together we might be capable. May we conclude by emphasising that in this first year of our editorship, we really have seen the very best of professional interaction between authors and reviewers. We were keen to report this optimistic conclusion to our Editorial Committee and the Joint Management Committee at the annual meeting (ISA Toronto, 2019). Thank you so much to all our authors and hard-working reviewers who donate so much time for free to make the journal a success.
This commitment to ‘the new’ will also find reflection in a supplement to volume 26 in 2020. We are thus particularly pleased to announce that we will be publishing a special issue early in 2020. This is to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of the journal, which by then will have produced 25 full volumes since its founding. The title of the issue as it stands is Interdisciplinarity and the IR Innovation Horizon, and it is premised on the idea that there is a rich array of theory and of theoretically-informed empirical analysis of world politics taking place beyond the core ‘broad IR’ journals, which deserves serious engagement. We also seek to circumvent the strong tendency of IR scholarship to ‘domesticate’ insights from outside the field, repackaging these ‘outside’ contributions to fit those ‘internal’ IR conversations already taking place. We hope that the special issue will therefore explore how we can create more openings for scholarship in other disciplines to speak directly to IR audiences in our journal. The call issued in July 2018 was thus aimed above all at what ‘we’ in IR are not seeing. We received over 80 proposals, and at the ISA in Toronto 2019 we held a full-day workshop with the authors whose proposals had been accepted and developed into full papers. The post-workshop versions are now being sent out for review.
Our readership will from now on be able to test our vision and commitments against the concrete results. The June 2019 issue is the first issue entirely produced by the new Editors. Although we took over in January 2018, as all our readers know there is always a substantial ‘OnlineFirst’ tail of articles that are in the pipeline for assignment to upcoming issues. At any one time there is +/- a year of OnlineFirst articles available, with the most recent publications at the top. As the running order of each of the four volumes per year is established, so the list is reduced, but as articles are approved for publication, so it grows once again. All four issues in volume 24 (2018) and the March 2019 issue of volume 25 were composed of articles edited by the previous editorial team. This June issue thus presents the new. We shall be anxious to hear from the readership what you think of what we have produced. We also have an active Twitter feed that you can follow on @EuroJournIR.
Finally, with great pleasure we wish to highlight the lead article in this issue: Joanne Yao, ‘“Conquest from barbarism”: The Danube Commission, international order and the control of nature as a Standard of Civilization’. Our sincere congratulations are in order and I hope you will all join us in praise of this winner of the annual EJIR best article prize for 2019, sponsored by the European International Studies Association (EISA). The prize is awarded annually and is chosen from the OnlineFirst articles published in the previous year (2018 thus) by a jury of four: one Editorial team member, two EISA board members, and one external member. This article draws on historical sociology to re-examine 19th century contestation of the governance of the Danube river. It makes a number of contributions. First and foremost, it shows how the 19th century distinction between civilized and uncivilized nations was predicated not just on ideas about the governance of people, but also the successful conquest of nature. Secondly, it draws our attention to aesthetic imaginaries of the navigable river as a conduit of civilization, conveying trade, prosperity and order; but also capable of carrying chaos and barbarism in the opposite direction. Thirdly, it historicises the ideological underpinnings of seemingly technocratic institutions such as the Danube Commission. The article is meticulously researched and makes riveting reading.
Well, Joanne, we hope to see a return performance through more submissions from you. To all of you out there as our authors and faithful readership, we look forward to yet more of your work.