CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 54 / Mobility and power in International Relations

Publication: October 2023

Currently, mobilities and immobilities seem to be everywhere. Viruses that circulate and produce restrictions on movement; migrants, refugees and tourists that travel or are stranded; global supply chains, digital data, satellites that orbit in space; organisms, microorganisms, plants and animals that travel for scientific or commercial purposes, and/or due to environmental change; borders that are regulated, externalized or reinforced.. mobility is not a new practice from a historical perspective, but is a constitutive feature of several spheres of human and non-human life at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Politics is not a sphere which is foreign to these practices of (im)mobility. Experiences like the COVID-19 pandemic show how the power to dominate (e.g. leaders, companies, agents of nature) and resist (e.g. the poor, migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, ecosystem resilience) is organized and exercised through (im)mobility. Therefore, it is difficult to understand relations of power without attending to mobility and immobility. According to Tim Cresswell (2010), (im)mobility is politics and can be understood in three ways: i) the movement that corresponds to the physical displacement of people, objects, or agents through space; ii) the social dimension that refers to the meanings socially attributed to movement and friction; and, finally, iii) the experiential dimension that has a bearing on how agents experience mobilities and immobilities from their own specific realities.

Curiously, the field of International Relations (IR) has until now made only scarce contributions to critical studies on mobility in the Social Sciences. Although it seems evident that analysing global power, power and its asymmetries entails thinking about (im)mobility today, IR has hardly contributed to the so called “mobility turn”. This refers to an interdisciplinary endeavour that, among other things, questions two general assumptions of social theory; first, that mobility is only the physical displacement between two points and, second, that it is the result of other social dynamics (e.g. economic globalization, border control, socio-environmental catastrophes like tsunamis, droughts, or others) and it does not have constitutive capacity in and of itself. With the aim of revising critically these assumptions, fields like Geography, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, Tourism and Transport Studies, and Feminist Studies have fuelled the debate on (im)mobility in different ways. However, the field of IR and its contributions have been somewhat of an exception, where its production is concentrated mainly in Critical Security Studies. (Soguz and Whitehall, 1999; Aradau and Huysmans, 2009; Aradau, Huysmans and Squire, 2010; Aradau and Blake, 2010; Salter, 2013, 2015; Aradau, 2016; Lesse and Wittendorp, 2017, 2018; Penttinen and Kynsilehto, 2017; Iranzo, 2021; Huysmans, 2021; Kynsilehto, 2021).

Therefore, the objective of this issue is to broaden the horizons and depths of reflection that IR can contribute to the interdisciplinary debate on (im)mobility and power in the World today. The nature itself of international relations evokes, necessarily, multiple (im)mobilities of people (e.g. diplomats, armies, scientists, missionaries, traders, slaves), raw materials (gold, silver, minerals, gas, food, herbs and spices), manufactured products, works of art and ideas (e.g. progress, civilization, development). In other words, the “relations” of “the international” have been historically traversed by policies and governments of (im)mobility. However, it is a dimension of analysis which is practically unexplored in the field.

This call is an invitation to “mobilize IR” or to “think international relations as a practice of kinetic power” through different questions and areas of reflection: 

• Conceptual developments on mobility in the theory of IR: a) theoretical approaches to the concept; b) why mobility has been “silenced” in IR theory; c) how politics of “space” and “time” and “mobility” are related in IR; d) specific conceptual contributions that IR theory can make to interdisciplinary debates on mobility; e) epistemological and ontological implications that the “mobility turn” has for IR theory.
• Historical analysis on the articulations between mobility and power in the genesis of international relations: a) how central topics of IR (e.g. statehood, sovereignty, borders, imperialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy) have been organized and governed through practices of (im)mobility; and b) what this historical analysis reveals to us about the current ways of understanding and (and regulating) mobility.
• Empirical studies on specific practices of (im)mobility-power with regard to international relations: migration, borders, security, citizenship, freedom, socio-environmental crises, climate change, economics and international trade, space policy, among other things. This section seeks to illustrate and feed the proposed debates with different and diverse case studies. 

Although these lines of research are prioritized, the acceptance of contributions will not be limited to the previously set out areas.

Issue 54 of Relaciones Internacionales will be published in October, 2023; el Editorial Team of the journal and the Coordination of the issue have established the following dates:

 

DUE DATE

SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES

The full document of the article must conform wholly and meticulously to the Style Manual of the journal. You can obtain our template for authors by clicking here (in Spanish). The submission stage ends on Monday 19th June 2023 (up to and including).

The submission of the article will be made on the web-page of the journal through the management platform OJS (Open Journal System). It is essential that the authors —all of them in the event that there is more than one— are registered by completing the requested data on the platform registration page with the most up-to-date information:

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.

• PLEASE NOTE: 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.

Throughout the evaluation process (between July and August), those authors whose text receives the complete approval of the assigned reviewers will be notified of the definitive acceptance of their article.

EDITING process

During the month of September 2023, the journal will proceed to the definitive editing of the text, to be published in October. The complete and careful compliance with the rules stated in the Style Manual of the journal is understood to be the responsibility of the authors, and this is a requirement for the final publication of the article in Issue 54.

PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME

Throughout the month of October 2023 the 54^th edition of the journal Relaciones Internacionales, with the title “Mobility and power in International Relations,” will be published in digital format, online, open access and free. All the articles that have fulfilled the requirements of the stages indicated above will be included.

LANGUAGES

Proposals in Spanish, English, and Portuguese will be accepted. Nonetheless, the articles will be translated to Spanish for publication in the journal. It will be the authors themselves who send the translated articles in Spanish.

OTHER INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS:

It is fundamental that the authors consult the Style Manual to get to know in detail the editing and evaluation requirements for publication in the journal. Moreover, the OJS system of the journal website allows for online tracking of all the administration processes and the state of the text.

Notification of copyright: the authors who publish in Relaciones Internacionales accept the following terms:

• The authors retain copyright and guarantee the right of first publication of the work to the journal, which will be simultaneously subject to the Creative Commons License Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
• The authors will be able to make other non-exclusive licence agreements for the distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., deposited in an electronic institutional archive or published in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
• It is permitted and recommended that the authors circulate their work through the internet (e.g., in electronic institutional archives or on their webpage) before and during the submission process, which can produce interesting exchanges and increase the citations of the published work.
• The authors are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permissions to reproduce material (text, images or graphs) from other publications and for citing their origins correctly.
• Relaciones Internacionales does not charge the authors any fees for the presentation, submission, or publication of the articles.

COORDINATION OF THE ISSUE

Ángela IRANZO – angela.iranzo@uam.es
Victoria SILVA SÁNCHEZ – vickysilvasanchez90@gmail.com