Editors past and present: Andrew Dorman
International Affairs’s current editor, Andrew Dorman, reflects on his tenure and the journal’s future.
This blogpost is part of a series of editorial retrospectives that discuss the impact of International Affairs’s (IA’s) editors in the context of the journal’s centenary. Andrew Dorman explores the changes he’s seen during his eight years with the journal, the centenary year and the upcoming 100th volume.
Before becoming editor in 2015, I had been a fan of the journal as well as an IA author, writing for example a series of articles on British defence and security policy with Paul Cornish. I happened to speak to Caroline Soper (my predecessor) on the last day for applications to succeed her as editor. An hour later I had sent off a hurried application and expected to hear nothing more. To my, and perhaps Chatham House’s, surprise I picked up the editor’s role from Caroline a month later.
Caroline’s were big shoes to fill, but fortunately for me she left behind the excellent team of Heidi Pettersson and Krisztina Csortea. I am delighted to say that both are still with the journal and they have both been at the heart of its successes. Since then, the team has slowly expanded in line with content growth, and the journal has been blessed by the dedication and hard work of its small team of staff and contractors. All have brought in new ideas and encouraged us to try new things.
Over the last eight years some things have remained constant. We have continued to maintain the journal’s position as forum for debate, bringing together academics and practitioners on topics covering the whole of international relations. This has been at the heart of the Chatham House’s mission and continues to be the journal’s focus — how the journal goes about this, however, has changed. The other constant remains the journal’s book reviews section, which continues to review books on all themes and regions relevant to international relations.
But there has also been change. We are delighted to be working in partnership with our publisher, Oxford University Press, and for their willingness to try new things. It has been good to work with a publisher which has, at its core, an emphasis on education and knowledge and subscribes to a similar set of values to the journal and Chatham House.
As a new team, we initially set ourselves three goals, in some ways conflicting with each other. First, we aimed to raise the journal’s relative standing in the Impact Factor rankings, to become a top 10 International Relations journal. This wasn’t always simple. In the early years, we had moments when we wondered whether we would have sufficient content to fill the next issue. Now we receive an ever-increasing number of submissions, and to our amazement we hit the top spot in the Impact Factor rankings in 2021. Our aim is to maintain the journal in the top tier.
Second, we felt that the journal had become a little specialized and have therefore sought to return it to its broad international relations roots. We were delighted that our first special issue, guest edited by Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd, was on ‘The Futures of Women, Peace and Security’ (I then received my first ‘Dear Editor’ email suggesting we shouldn’t be engaging with this type of content).
Third, as a team we were keen to broaden the journal’s author base, making it more diverse and inclusive. Both of our boards have been very supportive of this goal, giving us good ideas and suggestions. In particular, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Ruth Blakeley. Despite good intentions, we were conscious that our author base remained quite skewed. Partly out of frustration, we organized a roundtable at the 2019 ISA convention in Toronto, entitled ‘Where are the women? Publishing in the International Relations mainstream journals’. It brought together editors and scholars to consider why women were so under-represented in the leading journals. Scheduled for the graveyard slot on the Saturday, the room was nonetheless packed and it was a real opportunity for discussion. At the end, Ruth Blakeley, the then outgoing editor of the BISA journal Review of International Studies, wondered what it would take for a leading journal to achieve gender parity. The discussion at ISA led the IA team to publicly challenge itself to achieving a 50:50 gender balance in 2020. Despite COVID — 19 the team met the goal, and I can only marvel at their enthusiasm and commitment. We are delighted other journals have picked up the challenge, but EDI remains an ongoing concern for journal teams.
Last year, we were fortunate to celebrate the journal’s centenary with two fantastic special issues. The first, on ‘Race and Imperialism in international relations: theory and practice’, guest edited by Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, challenged much of our existing thinking and the basis on which it is constructed. In September, Daniel W. Drezner and Amrita Narlikar guest edited ‘International relations: the “how not to” guide’, highlighting how much we don’t know and have got wrong. We also produced a series of Archive Collections on topics ranging from war and conflict to the role of women in the discipline, drawing on 100 years of IA content.
Looking ahead to 2024, in time for the journal’s 100th volume (publication was disrupted by the Second World War) we will be launching a new section of shorter, policy focused papers aimed at increasing impact within the policy community. Details of the new section will be announced next month…
Andrew Dorman is Editor of International Affairs and Professor of International Security at King’s College London.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
