finding qualified reviewers for the manuscripts. This journal, and I suppose others, have an algorithm that produces several possibly potential persons who can act as a reviewer for a manuscript. Like anything else the service is not perfect and it often becomes necessary to go elsewhere to find reviewers. That involves the editorial board, and an option of asking the contact author, for the names and e-mails of persons able to provide a review. What invariably happens is that the potential reviewers, for the most part, are from the country, or region of the contact author. Again, that is to be expected since as a species we tend to trust others who have a similar background and life experience to provide comments on the content of our work. There is nothing particularly wrong, or nefarious, about this practice. In the spirit of full disclosure I have done the exact same thing when asked to provide names of potential reviewers. However, that practice is somewhat constricted in the expected result.
As scientists we should be willing to have the work evaluated by those who have knowledge of the subject matter, but are not so invested in the content, or do not have close personal knowledge of the author. During the submission process this journal, and others I have submitted manuscripts to, provide an option for excluding persons, at the discretion of the contact author, from acting as reviewers. That limits the pool of eligible reviewers when there are probably very few persons who could be considered qualified to do a review of any particular subject. There are more that have some knowledge of a subject who work on similar issues, and there are those who have a narrow view of the discipline where they will not consider reviewing an article unless it contains the same keywords they assign to manuscripts.
Having said that, this is an international journal, it says so in the title. That means authors from all locations on the globe are invited to submit manuscripts for consideration for acceptance and publication. However, the process to do that requires that the manuscript undergo review. The persons who do that should be as diverse as the cultures that make up the scientific communities in the various countries in the world. As scientists we should embrace those working on the same sort of projects described in any given manuscript as colleagues. Those colleagues should be called on to provide constructive criticism on the content of any specific manuscript within their sphere of expertise regardless of national origin. It is continues to be my aim to include responses from all qualified reviewers in order to obtain views from an international audience so that the content of any given manuscript is applicable to an international group of readers.