Editorial

Geopolitics has continued to thrive during difficult times over the past two years and we want to begin by thanking the authors, reviewers, and readers who support the journal and make it what it is. We could not do it without all of you. Thanks.

This editorial provides an update on changes and new initiatives at the journal. First, there were several transitions in the editorial team. Takashi Yamazaki and Corey Johnson completed their terms as co-editors of the journal after four and five years in the role respectively. We thank them for their dedicated service to Geopolitics. Chenchen Zhang joined as a co-editor in 2022 and Lisa Marie Borrelli joined in 2023. Jasnea Sarma took up the role of forum and review editor in 2022.

We are excited to announce two new awards in 2024. The first is the Geopolitics Peer Review Award, which is given yearly by the editorial team to a peer reviewer from the previous academic year who provided exceptional service through their review work. As many journals have found, it can be difficult to find willing reviewers for articles. Sometimes it can take as many as ten requests to find only two or three reviewers. Reviewing is anonymous, so there is little recognition for people who agree to review, provide the reviews in a timely manner, and give a generous but fair take on the article. Often the best reviews are not the longest, but the ones that show the reviewer has taken the time to actually hear what the author is trying to say and provides suggestions on how to communicate that argument more effectively. The winner will be announced in the spring each year, to correspond with the business meeting at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting.

The second new award is given jointly with the Commission on Political Geography of the International Geographical Union. The Geopolitics Journal Post-Graduate Research Paper Award will be given to the best student paper presented at the Political Geography Pre-Conference at Queen’s University Belfast 22–24 August 2024. The winner will receive $200 USD and will also be invited to submit the paper to Geopolitics. See the Political Geography Commission’s website for more information.

We are continuing our successful partnership with the Oxford Criminologies network through the publication of companion pieces to Geopolitics articles on the Border Criminologies website and blog. These companion pieces are meant to be accessible to a broader audience and often include additional stories or details that could not fit in the original article. At the time of the publication of the companion piece, Geopolitics makes the original article open access for one month.

The journal publishes multiple special issues every year. We have two deadlines for special issue proposals on June 1 and November 1. The proposal should include a short summary of the topic, the titles and abstracts of the papers, and the names and affiliations of the contributors. The introductions to special issues are automatically free to download. Over the past two years, we have published special issues on Towards Global Urban Geopolitics (Rokem and Boano 2023), The Geopolitics of Tourism in the Indo-Pacific (Ning and Dittmer 2023), The Geopolitics of Return Migration in the International System (Fakhoury and Zeynep 2023), More-than-Human-Borders (Ozguc and Burridge 2023), Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers (Sarma, Faxon, and Roberts 2023), Border Work in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands Vammen, Cold-Ravnkilde, and Lucht 2022), States of Suspicion (Borrelli, Lindberg, and Wyss 2022), Rethinking the Migrant Position (Mudu and Chattopadhyay 2022), Decentering the Study of Migration Governance in the Mediterranean (Zardo and Wolff 2022), Making and Unmaking Refugees (Myadar and Dempsey 2022), and Data Matters (Leese, Noori, and Scheel 2022).

The journal also publishes book review essays and geopolitical forums. The book review essays cover two to three books and give the author space to make a larger argument about a particular field, rather than simply describing the contents of the reviewed books (Borelli, Lindberg and Wyss 2022). We also welcome books outside the English language and from diverse spaces. To propose a book review, contact the Forum and Review Editor. Book review essays have included secrecy’s performativity (Glouftsios 2023), the US-Mexico border wall (Bourgeon 2023), unsettling self-determination, sovereignty, and claims to nativeness (Nevins 2023), and Popular Geopolitics 3.0? (Sidaway 2022).

Geopolitical forums are guest-edited, co-authored pieces that consist of an introduction written by the guest-editor(s) and 3–6 of contributions of 1,000 to 2,000 words about a key geopolitical event or debate. To propose a Geopolitical Forum, send the Forum and Review Editor a short proposal with a title, a synopsis of the forum, a list of contributors, and short descriptions of each contribution. Over the past two years, we have published new forums on digitisation and sovereignty in humanitarian spaces (Martin et al. 2023), contested spatialities of digital sovereignty (Glasze et al. 2023), shock mobility during times of uncertainty (Xiang et al. 2023), conceptualising the geopolitics of migration management (Borrelli et al. 2022), geopolitics and the new state capitalism (Alami et al. 2022), and the intimate and everyday geopolitics of the war against Ukraine (Wolfe et al. 2023).

We are thrilled with the number of open access articles published over the past two years. There are too many to highlight all of them, but they have included important pieces on a range of topics including waivers to build border walls in the US (Madsen 2023), the far right in the EU (Bassin 2023), refugee returns in Lebanon (Fakhoury and Stel 2023), and EU foreign policy in Central Asia (Winn and Gänzle 2023).

Finally, Taylor and Francis changed their publishing model from a maximum number of pages per year to a minimum number of articles. This has allowed us to dramatically reduce our online publication queue from over two years to about six to eight months currently. The journal’s acceptance rate remains low, less than twenty-five percent, but this change does allow us to publish more quality articles each year without a long delay between acceptance and formal publication in an issue.

Thanks again for your support over the years and we look forward to reading your new submissions. Send them our way.