Abstract
Under the astute stewardship of editorial teams based successively at Birmingham, Nottingham, Queen’s, and Edinburgh universities, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) has established itself as a journal of international significance, at the forefront of major disciplinary debates. We are particularly grateful for the work of the Edinburgh team in especially challenging circumstances. Those of us lucky enough to witness the late John Peterson in action understand the size of the shoes that the team had to fill, and they did so very effectively.
Assuming the editorship of BJPIR is a great privilege and a significant responsibility. As the new editors, we aim to build on BJPIR’s already impressive standing and further expand its international reach and reputation. To do this, our vision for the journal is premised upon two overriding concerns. First, we will extend BJPIR’s long-held reputation – as a flagship journal of the United Kingdom’s Political Studies Association (PSA) – for driving forward the research agenda in British politics and political studies. Specifically, to achieve this, our vision for BJPIR while it is at Leeds dovetails the strategic vision for the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and is to position ‘BJPIR’ at the forefront of scholarly efforts to understand and address the politics of global challenges, such as climate, health, violence, and geopolitics. Second, we will use our editorship to help further much-needed structural change in the academy. Working with the PSA, we will support the discipline-wide effort towards gender parity, and improve the journal’s representation of under-represented minority groups, scholars from the Global South, and early career researchers. These twin aims work in synergy; we are ambitious in our plans to expand the journal’s scope so that BJPIR serves a wider community of scholars.
In keeping with the journal’s distinctive history, BJPIR will continue to provide a forum for a diversity of approaches. Our vision is empirically, theoretically, and methodologically pluralist. We value and will continue to support work across the full breadth of the fields of international relations (IR), comparative politics, public policy, political theory, political economy, and politics, as well as genuinely interdisciplinary research agendas. This is reflected in the range of expertise of the Leeds editorial team, located in POLIS, which represents one of the largest and most diverse political studies departments in the country. In this Editorial Statement, we elaborate on these mutually reinforcing areas in turn, before returning to consider our role in addressing academic structural inequalities.
British politics and political studies
The landscape of British politics looked rather different when BJPIR was first published at the end of the 20th century. Despite the prominence of the European question, few observers regarded the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union as a serious possibility. While constitutional reform was firmly on the agenda, the possibility of the United Kingdom’s disintegration was not in the mainstream of political debate. And, despite the burgeoning literature on globalisation, the global financial crisis was not yet on the horizon, nor was the rise of populism widely foreseen. Issues such as these give a sense of the scale of the challenges facing British politics and political studies, both over the past two decades and going forward. Indeed, these are challenges that BJPIR has already made a name for itself in confronting and the journal will continue to do so (e.g. Wincott el al.’s 2017 introduction to the Brexit special issue; and Löfflmann’s 2021 introduction to a special issue on populism).
Much then has changed in British politics, and in political studies in the United Kingdom, in the 22 years since BJPIR was first published, but the original mission statement of the journal remains as relevant as ever. The founding editors were clear from the outset that the journal was ‘not intended to be Political Studies 2’, and that they wanted instead to forge a distinctive identity as a forum to ‘deepen and broaden our understanding of British politics’ (BJPIR Editors, 1999: 1). This core objective remains at the heart of the journal’s mission, with recent special issues and sections of the journal examining topics of direct relevance not only to the United Kingdom but to the rest of the world, for example, Chinese foreign policy and the legacy of the financial crash. Looking forward, we believe that British politics can be open and confident in drawing upon the best of a variety of sub-disciplines. With its tradition of intellectual pluralism and increasing methodological innovation, British political studies is well placed to address the most pressing political questions the United Kingdom and the world will face this century. It is our hope and belief as editors that BJPIR can be at the forefront of efforts to understand and address the politics of these global challenges, and act as a forum for a diversity of approaches and voices in so doing.
The politics of global challenges
While it is at Leeds, our vision is to position ‘BJPIR’ at the forefront of scholarly efforts to understand and address the politics of global challenges, broadly understood. We believe that BJPIR offers a unique convening point to consider the role of Political Science and IR in scholarly efforts to understand and address global challenges. It is also positioned to assess to what degree British political studies offers a lens through which to explore these issues, for example because of the United Kingdom’s geopolitical position or the legacy of colonialism. This is particularly the case where the United Kingdom has sought to position itself as a global leader – for example, on climate change, cyber security, or international aid – or where the United Kingdom offers itself as a fascinating potential case study, for example, in its pandemic response. Our editorship – and aim to foster a more global British journal – coincides with the United Kingdom’s political efforts to promote an era of Global Britain. The journal will retain its distinctive identity as an internationally orientated British outlet, as we set out a vision to position BJPIR as addressing the politics of global challenges.
These challenges include, for example, the pressing issues facing the planet related to the climate emergency, environmental change, health, food, demographic pressures, energy, resources, (in)security, and geopolitics – and the complex interlinkages between them. Our focus is on the politics of these challenges, including the ways in which global inequalities shape how such challenges are experienced, mediated, and contested at a range of levels. This is not an exhaustive list and should not detract from the significance of other important issues. Nor is it to suggest that other work is unwelcome. Far from it. The journal will remain the destination of choice for scholarship on topics where it has already played an important role in disseminating leading research. Our intention, in the spirit of the founding editorial, is to further broaden as well as deepen the scope of the research agenda the journal supports and promotes, in line with the urgent politics of the contemporary context. Here, we outline four significant, illustrative global challenges that we would like to see addressed in the pages of BJPIR.
Climate politics
From a British perspective, the commitment to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 poses numerous public policy questions and presents the United Kingdom an interesting case study in the domestic politics of climate change. Climate Change is also an arena in which the United Kingdom has attempted to position itself as a global leader. In the context of Brexit, the UK presidency of COP26 (alongside Italy) provides possibilities to perform its self-appointed role as ‘Global Britain’. To be sure, finding agreement on climate change is a colossal challenge, requiring immense political will to overcome formidable obstacles that our discipline(s) are particularly well placed to understand, articulate, and overcome. While climate science has advanced our understandings of its catastrophic implications, the failure to avert runaway global warming is a political one (Shue 2019: 254). Although the climate emergency is arguably the most significant of today’s planetary challenges, there remains an enduring lack of political will to tackle it. Necessary transformations are derailed by weak global and national institutions and processes. In the absence of effective cooperation, normative theorists are crucial in making the moral case for collective action (Cripps, 2013) and the nature of obligations to future generations (McKinnon, 2012).
BJPIR has already published several important pieces on climate politics. To coincide with COP26 in the United Kingdom, our first ‘Editors’ Choice Collection’ draws attention to seven of these articles. The collection is a first manifestation of our vision, pushing at the comfortable borders of the discipline(s), through novel and pluralist approaches, engaging both normative concerns (Di Chiro, 2019; Falkner, 2019; McKinnon, 2019; Schlosberg, 2019; Shue, 2019) and quantitative methods (Arıkan and Günay, 2020; Crawley et al., 2020). We released this collection as a call to political scientists to give the politics of the climate emergency urgent attention. Going forward, we particularly encourage scholarship from scholars who are under-represented in highly cited climate science research (see Reuters, 2021), in part to help to eradicate ‘blind spots’ in relation to those populations most vulnerable to climate change (Schipper et al., 2021; Tandon, 2021).
The politics of health
It is, of course, presently impossible to speak of global challenges without giving considerable attention to the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of our hyper-connected world, causing incalculable human, social, and economic costs, and confirming what health scholars have long argued; this is an issue of ‘high politics’ (Harman, 2012). As with climate change, the pandemic has revealed the enduring weaknesses of key global institutions, the limits of political leadership, and seemingly insurmountable barriers to cooperation (Davies, 2020). As with previous pandemics, COVID-19 has exposed entrenched relations of power, and the intersecting structural inequalities of capitalism, race, and gender that help to create health crises in the first place (Harman, 2016; Sparke and Williams, 2021; Wenham, 2016). Like climate, the challenge of protecting and promoting health ‘is an inherently political one’ (Lee, 2004: 11). Politics is key to building the capacities, resources, and resilience needed to address contemporary global health challenges. And yet, global health policy tends to be reactive, targeting exceptional cases of acute health emergency without the deeper commitments to health system strengthening and addressing the underlying determinants of health.
The pandemic and its legacies therefore pose clear and significant challenges for the disciplines of Political Science and IR. BJPIR has a track record of addressing the politics of health across its 22-year history (e.g. from Moran, 2000; to Mattila et al., 2020; and Hawkins and McCambridge, 2021), although this is more limited than we would like. We are keen to publish more on the politics of health because, like climate, it poses fundamental disciplinary and real-world challenges (Davies et al., 2014). Health research is also an arena that extends our gaze upwards (to the global and planetary; see Myers, 2017) and downwards (to the individual, the body, and the microbial). Health also necessitates more multidisciplinary perspectives, as an interdisciplinary field of study (McInnes et al., 2019: 1), to tackle the challenges relating to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), mental health, and bioethics. As the new editors, we recognise the importance of publishing more work on health with a global focus, including perspectives from those regions and actors marginalised in current understandings and work from the global majority (Bhakuni and Abimbola, 2021; Oti and Ncayiyana, 2021).
Violence and security
Before COVID-19 overshadowed world politics, the politics and international relations (IR) of the past two decades had often been defined by the events of 11 September 2001, and the fallout from those attacks. The War on Terror continues, two decades on, even as we pass 10 years since the Arab Uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria remain seared into collective memory, not least following the tragic inevitability of Kabul’s recent fall. That focus is, however, to downplay civil wars and human catastrophes in less familiar worlds – the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen, for example – which remain largely out of a distracted western gaze. Alongside IR’s traditional and quintessential terrain, studying the causes and consequences of military conflict, genocide has reignited the urgency of debates on the Responsibility to Protect, recently for example in Myanmar. War, conflict, and ethnic cleansing present real, visceral human harms that we are keen for the journal to continue to address and seek to rectify. Foreign, security, and counterterrorism policies remain at the heart of our vision of IR because defence and military interventions remain central to world politics.
To this, we add a vital rejoinder; the world’s militarism, as much as its militaries, presents a global challenge to be confronted. Drawing on Peace Studies, the Welsh School of Security Studies, and theories of structural violence, we note that security extends beyond the visceral to encompass other forms of suffering – prejudice, marginalisation, hopelessness. These too are ‘bodily’ and lived. They are, however, perhaps less ‘exceptional’ than militarised conflicts. The recent turn to everyday IR and everyday security pays testament to the (important) banality of security and security politics (Nyman, 2021). From widespread domestic violence and racial prejudice – from #metoo to #BLM – to the structuring effects of contemporary logics of counterterrorism, we recognise that violence and security are complex and multi-layered. We are normatively motivated to welcome submissions across the broad range of contemporary violence and responses to it, from war to the insidious capillaries of power that shape all of life’s possibilities and potentialities.
Geopolitics and global re-ordering
Now outside the European Union, Britain is looking to establish a new internationalist identity by reinvigorating old alliances as well as through its membership of key international bodies such as the G7 and UN Security Council. On the back of the United Kingdom’s Integrated Review, Global Britain’s first foray as part of the Indo-Pacific Tilt has been to sideline France, in favour of old Anglosphere allies. Even as scholars and political elites work out what AUKUS represents – military coalition, technology sharing arrangement, or both – it is clear that adding Australia to the fold of the Special Relationship extends Pacific force projection capabilities. Efforts to maintain freedom of the seas and uphold a maritime capitalist liberal international order certainly appear bold and are evidence of a temporal horizon that extends beyond the mid-21st century, as the United Kingdom prepares for potential hegemonic transition in the context of an increasingly multipolar international system. Alliterative metaphors abound when discussing the rise of China – competitive cooperation, containment, confrontation. As key states in the Asia-Pacific weigh up the durability of strategic ambiguity, the United Kingdom is positioning itself as an active player in efforts to shape world order.
Alongside important theoretical and empirical questions of global re-ordering, scholars have also raised crucial questions about the way IR is studied and pointed to the need for greater appreciation of IR as a global discipline (Thakur and Smith, 2021). Britain’s ‘new’ role has long and problematic roots that entangle with our research and teaching. Over the past decade, there has been mounting criticism of Western hegemony and the marginalisation of non-Western theory within the discipline (Acharya and Buzan, 2017; Vitalis, 2016). We recognise the need to reflect on previous British foreign policy and its imbrications with our disciplines, as scholars increasingly reckon with colonial academic legacies amid an imperial present. BJPIR has done important work in bringing in global perspectives on political studies and IR, notably for example, with the 2021 Special Issue on Chinese foreign policy, which includes important contributions from leading Chinese scholars (e.g. Zha and Gong, 2021). The late John Peterson ‘not only thought that the time was right to have an assessment of this type’ but was also: keen to ensure that this was not just an analysis of China from the outside either, and wanted to see a real partnership that included Chinese voices and perceptions. And in keeping with his commitment to mentoring and nurturing future generations of scholars, it was to be a collection that would include scholars at rather different stages of their careers. (Breslin and Pan, 2021: 197)
We seek to continue this legacy, encouraging scholarship examining the multi-polarity of global re-ordering, including work on rising powers (China, India, Brazil, South Africa) and regional power blocs.
Redressing structural inequality in the academy
A focus on the politics of global challenges helps us to take seriously the call by Schipper et al. (2021) for journal editors to confront the significant inequities of the academy and broader efforts by PSA and others to decolonise Politics and IR (e.g. Begum and Saini, 2019; Shilliam, 2021). In our hyper-connected world, our fates are intertwined and global perspectives on contemporary challenges are vital. We will therefore seek to diversify the journal’s Editorial Board and reviewer pool. We will also ensure gender balance in publisher article promotion, extending targeting beyond the United Kingdom and the United States, with a particular focus on the Global South. And we will make use of opportunities for open access special issues to draw attention to key articles from under-represented authors. We will ask authors to reflect on their citation practices with equality, diversity, and inclusion in mind, given widespread citation inequities (Maliniak et al., 2013). Crucially, we will encourage submissions from Global South authors and authors from under-represented backgrounds, as well as encouraging work challenging western-centric knowledge and approaches. To realise these aims we will draw on the editorial team’s extensive global networks to extend the scope of the advisory board and promote active links with Global South and Asian scholars through guest editorship, where possible. We will develop special issues on topics relating to global challenges that attract greater diversity, and work with the PSA to run targeted support workshops (such as with the Early Career Network) and explore approaches which proactively mitigate possible unconscious bias and other obstacles to diversity.
The PSA has made equality and diversity a strategic priority. Chris Hanretty’s (2021) report made clear the considerable work still required, even where progress has been made. In particular, the improvement regarding the gender balance in submissions and publications in recent years has been undermined by the pandemic. The effects of lockdown fell disproportionally on women, parents, and those with caring responsibilities, which is reflected in a downturn in submissions from these groups across a range of journals, including BJPIR. There is much work to do, and we are only one small part of a broader effort. However, we see these objectives not only as right in and of themselves, but as essential to our plans to widen the reach and impact of BJPIR. As Schipper et al. (2021) argue, ‘we must defeat the inequity in academia in order to produce more usable and appropriate knowledge’.