CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 52 / "COVID-19: Re-reading international relations in light of the pandemic"

Publication: February 2023

The central objective of this call for papers for Issue 52 of the journal is to promote a critical reflection on the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19, from now on) and its many consequences through the diverse theoretical currents of international relations.

Since the end of 2019, when first news was received of a new infectious disease in the city of Wuhan, until the present day, the literature on the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been evolving in parallel with the development of global events. International experience of previous health emergencies has not been enough to avoid a crisis of global magnitude. Although covid-19 does not distinguish between gender, creed or social status, its impact is increasing the existing inequalities in and between countries, while exacerbating cooperation and conflict dynamics in global governance. Its influence – transversal and profound- spans the global to the individual, having a bearing on practically all of the political, economic and social spheres. All the while, its long term consequences remain unpredictable.

Among the immediate effects have been the collapse of healthcare systems – with a consequent congestion of essential medical services used in the treatment of other illnesses -, the adoption of quarantine, confinement, and safe-distancing measures, the cessation of economic activity, restrictions of movement and the closure of transnational borders. Thus, a series of steps have been deemed necessary and adopted to break the ascending numbers of infections.

However, even when the health of populations has been protected, collateral phenomena emerge with medium and long-term consequences. Amongst other things, the cessation of economic activity has affected family and national finances, a situation that in turn entails governments taking on more debt, and, in many cases, the adoption of reform and recovery public policies. Moreover, this has triggered and worsened political and social crises in diverse parts of the World. For example, social distancing measures have massively increased the use of digital technologies in social life, including educational, work, and leisure activities. At the same time, the gap between the rich and the poor has been exacerbated, demonstrating the lack of protection and guarantee of the rights of the most vulnerable. Ultimately, this enduring and uncertain reality entails a series of implications on practically every sphere of social, political and economic life, and, even today, it obliges us to take actions and re-think ourselves in relation to the virus.

In the theoretical realm, the present time constitutes an unprecedented opportunity to look back at the epistemological, ontological and methodological foundations of international relations. Without a doubt, throughout these two years academia has provided undeniable and substantive initiatives to understand, explain and support the management of the pandemic and the consequences internationally. However, we find it more than pertinent to facilitate a space of reflection on the virtues and silences of the multiple approaches and debates that are presented when facing up to the complex reality after the covid-19 pandemic. In the same way, we consider that this situation is an ideal moment for such introspection, and will allow for new work on the current period in which the discipline finds itself, encouraging critical thought on the perspectives we choose when analysing the international system and facilitating reflection on possible inter-paradigmatic debates that are still to be constructed.

With these introductory comments the journal Relaciones Internacionales opens the call for Issue 52 and the receipt of original and unpublished articles on the link between the pandemic caused by covid-19 and international relations. A special emphasis is placed on those articles that are focussed on a structural analysis of the international system of the discipline. Although the list is not exclusive, a series of themes are proposed next that will be of special interest for the present issue:

• Analysis of the pandemic and its consequences: of particular interest will be those contributions that, from an international relations approach, reflect on different questions about the global health crisis cause by covid-19. Some suggestions are: restrictions of movement, confinement measures, and both national and international quarantine systems; commercialization of health; problems surrounding public health, economics, security, freedom and fundamental rights; infoxication and disinformation: the role of social media and the influence of fake news; questioning and rejections of scientific knowledge: rejectionism, antivaccine movements and the growing phenomenon of conspiracy theories; the transformation of relations in urban, rural and virtual world spaces; emerging debates on humanitarian emergency situations and development cooperation.
  
  
• Analysis of international relations, geopolitics and world order: we invite contributions that focus their object of study on the role that diverse actors have played in the international arena, and how this has had a bearing on the path of events derived both directly and indirectly from the pandemic. In this sense, we refer both to states and non-state actors like international organizations, scientific experts, medical laboratories, civil society and media, amongst others. Moreover, contributions that analyse the unequal capacities in and between socio-economic sectors of a given society in protecting itself against the virus and reacting to the consequences of the adopted measures shall also be valued; as well as the narratives, material capacities, and cooperation and conflict dynamics between countries, or the discourses of individual and collective identity in the context of the pandemic.
  
  
• Impact of the pandemic on the respect, guarantee and protection of international regimes of human rights: contributions will be valued that tackle the deepening of economic and social asymmetries, and the consequent aggravation of access opportunities to basic services and other rights. Likewise, those contributions that analyse the impact of covid-19 on the civil, political economic, social and cultural rights of women, people on the move, victims of trafficking for the purpose of exploitation, ethnic and religious minorities, the collective LGBTI, childhood and adolescence, people with functional diversity; as well as environmental and digital rights etc. Either from the international agenda itself, or on the particular situation in a region or study area.
  
  
• International relations theory: especially sought are those contributions that reflect on the evolution of the inter-paradigmatic debates at the heart of the discipline after the emergence of the pandemic. That is, contributions that consider, from a critical perspective, the ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of the different theoretical currents used to approach the current reality.
  
  
• Research agendas: evaluated positively will be those articles that adopt a critical perspective, and in taking the pandemic’s effects as a starting point, enrich the debate between the different research agendas of international relations. This can be done by making a contribution from an analysis of the international reality, as well as looking at answers to the securitization of health from past decades. Amongst other things, we refer to the research agendas of critical security studies, studies of biopolitics, poststructuralism, critical geopolitics, gender studies and critical feminisms. Likewise, contributions are valued from area studies and the analysis of specific cases.

The issue 52 of Relaciones Internacionales will be published in February, 2023; the Editorial Team of the journal and the Coordination of the issue have established the following dates:

 

DUE DATE

ABSTRACT
A text of between 500 and 1000 words should be sent showing with concision and clarity the fundamental aspects to be developed in the following article. The submission date ends on the 1st of May, 2022 (up to and including). The proposal should be sent in a PDF document indicating the name and institutional affiliation of the authors, as well as the provisional title of the article and the text of the abstract. A copy should also be sent to the following three email addresses:

c.castilla95@gmail.com
anisabel.carrasco@gmail.com
jldelaflorgomez@gmail.com

COMMUNICATION OF ACCEPTANCE
The coordinators of the journal will analyse the submitted manuscripts to verify if the proposals conform to the research areas defined in the call for papers, and will communicate, by email, the acceptance or rejection of the proposals on 15th of May, 2022.

ARTICLES:
The full document of the article should be sent by the authors to the coordinators until the 4h of September, 2022 (up to and including). The article must conform wholly and meticulously to the Style Manual of the Relaciones Internacionales journal.

The delivery of the article should be made on the web site of the journal, through its administration platform OJS (Open Journal System), so it will be essential that the authors —all of them, in the event that there is more than one— are registered on the web by completing the requested data on the platform registration page with the highest level of detail and updating:
https://revistas.uam.es/relacionesinternacionales

EVALUATION process:
Once the article is submitted correctly through the website the double-blind evaluation process begins. The decision process will take between three and six months, depending on the case: this may include the return of the text to its author(s) for the revision or correction of changes and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers. During the evaluation process, the reviewers will be responsible for certifying the quality of the work of the authors, as well as the appropriateness of the final texts for the topics proposed in the call for papers.

• IMPORTANT NOTICE: suggestions by the authors of possible reviewers for the evaluation of their texts are permitted. With the text of your proposal, you can send us by email the names of academics with extensive knowledge of the aspects dealt with in your work so that- if the coordination considers it appropriate- these people can be contacted as blind reviewers.

DEFINITIVE ACCEPTANCE:
Throughout the evaluation process (between October, 2022 – January, 2023), those authors whose text receives the complete approval of the assigned reviewers will be notified of the definitive acceptance of their article, at which time they can have the absolute certainty that the paper will be published in the journal. That the article is published in Issue 52 as planned – and not in a later issue – is subject to the complete conformity of the text to the instructions indicated in the Style Manual of the journal, or any other contingencies that will be duly communicated to the authors.

EDITING process:
During the month of January, the journal will proceed to the definitive editing of the text to be published in February. It is emphasized again to the authors that it is obligatory to fulfil scrupulously the Style Manual of the journal in order to avoid delays that could hold back the publication of the text to a later issue.

PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME:
Throughout the month of February, 2023, Issue 52 of the journal Relaciones Internacionales, which has the title “COVID-19: Rereading international relations in light of the pandemic”, will be published digitally, online, open-access and free. All of the articles that have satisfactorily fulfilled the requirements of the stages indicated above will be included.

LANGUAGES:

Proposals in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French will be accepted (the full texts can be evaluated in these languages). However, in the event that they are accepted in the double-blind review process, the articles must be translated to Spanish for publication in the journal. It will be the authors themselves who send the translated articles in Spanish and by the date indicated by the journal.

COORDINATION OF THE ISSUE

Cristina CASTILLA CID – c.castilla95@gmail.com
Ana Isabel CARRASCO VINTIMILLA – anisabel.carrasco@gmail.com
José Luis DE LA FLOR GOMEZ – jldelaflorgomez@gmail.com