CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 57 / The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Ten Years Later: Progress, Resistance and Challenges

Publication: October 2025

Anniversaries are always a good time to take stock of a process, but in the case of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, due to transformations in the international context over recent years (the COVID-19 pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, accelerated climate change), it is important not only to assess its progress, but also to reflect on the relevance of the goals established in 2015 in today’s world.

On the other hand, the recent global rise of reactionary populism that rejects the 2030 Agenda, seeing it as a threat to national sovereignty and defining it with exaggerated dangers, has turned the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a rallying point for people, organizations, and governments committed to “leaving no one behind,” as well as for those who seek to challenge multilateral governance processes (or “globalism,” in their terms) and return to a strictly national perspective.

Therefore, to mark the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, the journal Relaciones Internacionales plans to publish a special issue on this subject in October 2025. This issue aims to examine the performance of the Agenda over the past decade and explore prospects for achieving its targets with only five years remaining until the set deadline.

The journal had the opportunity to address this topic in February 2015, when, during the transition from the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Issue 28 analyzed the path towards global sustainable development goals. In this regard, the upcoming issue also aims to serve as a connecting thread in the journal's coverage of sustainable development processes and related topics, such as developments in International Relations in regard to environment, addressed in Issues 33 and 34; human security in Issue 43; and world ecology, the Capitalocene, and global accumulation in Issues 46 and 47.

This special issue aims to address, among other topics related to the 2030 Agenda: 

• Sectoral analysis of the progress made toward achieving the various SDGs.
• Proposals for alternatives to the SDG framework at an international level, based on decolonial approaches.
• The reflection on the evolution of the different structural aspects that constitute the basis of the 2030 Agenda since its adoption:
  • The role of emerging countries and their institutional structures (i.e. BRICS) and the importance of South-South cooperation.
  • The limits of the traditional institutional system for development co-operation (OECD Development Assistance Committee, United Nations Development Program) in addressing the SDGs.
  • The confluence of different agendas and international regimes (development, environment, peace, human rights) within the SDGs, with a very marked difference in importance.
  • The adoption of international commitments through soft law instruments that are not legally binding.
  • The need to adopt coherent development policies that, transcending development divisions, affect all interventions of different actors (states, companies) at the global level, as a requirement for achieving the SDGs.
• Reflection on the issues that have been incorporated in recent years, fuelled by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the rise of reactionary populisms:
  • The global impact of the war in Ukraine on the SDGs, especially concerning food, energy, and financial systems, which are crucial for achieving the 2030 Agenda.
  • Technological innovation as a means to improve the achievement of the SDGs, exemplified by COVID-19 vaccines, taking into account the brutal international inequality in access to this innovation, a circumstance that could be happen again in future cases.
  • The rise of a kind of international anti-2030 Agenda movement, which aligns with issues such as feminism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism, as areas rejected by reactionary populisms at the global level.
• Analysis of what seems to be the great existential problem for humanity at a global level: the acceleration of climate change, which, beyond preventing the achievement of environmental goals (especially SDG number 13) will exacerbate other global issues, such as humanitarian emergencies, human mobility, armed conflict, access to basic resources like water, and the proliferation of global pandemics. 

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

Issue 60 of Relaciones Internacionales will be published in October, 2025; the Editorial Team of the journal and the Coordination of the issue have established the following dates:

 

DUE DATE

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACT

A text of between 500 and 1000 words should be sent that displays clearly and concisely the fundamental aspects to be developed in the subsequent article. The submission period ends on 1st December, 2024 (up to and including). The proposal must be sent in a PDF document indicating authors, their institutional affiliation, provisional title of the article and text of the abstract, and with the following two email addresses in copy:

• Ángel González - angel.gonzalez.navas@uc3m.es
• Jorge Estévez - jorgeestevezrodriguez@gmail.com

COMMUNICATION OF ACCEPTANCE

The issue coordinators will analyse the articles sent to check if the authors’ proposals align with the lines of investigation defined in the present call for papers, and they will communicate by email the acceptance or rejection of the proposals on the 5th December, 2024.

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 27th April, 2025 (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.

DEFINITIVE ACCEPTANCE

Throughout the evaluation process (between May, 2025 - August, 2025), 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 60 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 other contingencies that will be duly communicated to the authors.

EDITING process

During the month of September 2025, 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 60.

PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME

Throughout the month of October 2025 the 60^th edition of the journal Relaciones Internacionales, with the title “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Ten Years Later: Progress, Resistance and Challenges,” 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 and English 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

Ángel GONZÁLEZ – angel.gonzalez.navas@uc3m.es
Jorge ESTÉVEZ – jorgeestevezrodriguez@gmail.com