From the Editors
| Author | Darshan Vigneswaran,Annette Freyberg-Inan,Lee Seymour,Luc Fransen,Geoffrey Underhill |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120907411 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120907411
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(1) 3 –7
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120907411
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From the Editors
May we begin by wishing the EJIR Happy Birthday! The year 2020 is the silver jubilee
of the journal’s founding in 1995. After 25 years this journal holds as important a place
as ever in the pantheon of the general International Relations (IR) literature. Our readers
may expect a special jubilee issue later this year.
Our last editorial, which accompanied the June 2019 issue, announced the advent of
the first complete issue consisting of articles edited by the Amsterdam editorial team that
took over in January 2018. Since then we have produced three further issues including this
current one for March 2020. This issue leads with an article on the lack of great power
responsibility for the global environment, followed by an article on sovereign debt mar-
kets. There is then a cluster of articles on identity and populism in various contexts, before
the issue returns to that grim business called war. The final article takes a new but equally
serious turn, focusing on the international context of the London Grenfell Towers fire. Our
authors are a truly cosmopolitan selection from all over the globe, and they both cover and
broaden the field as it evolves. We hope you will agree that we are keeping up the high
standards in terms of scholarly quality and intellectual openness our readership should
expect and that has established the reputation of the journal during these past 25 years.
The summer and autumn of 2019 were periods of high pressure and change at the
journal. In the latter half of the year we saw a significant surge in submissions relative to
the year before and the first half of the year. This is good, but it demands more of our
time. We also experienced the first of two changes in the editorial team. Prof Marlies
Glasius, our Associate Editor for international law (also human rights, human security,
transitional justice, social movements and NGOs, authoritarianism and democratisation),
became our head of department here in Amsterdam as of September 2019. The resulting
workload being incompatible with remaining associate editor, she stepped down at the
beginning of September 2019. This meant that in the face of the surge, we were also
short-handed as a team. Some authors will have waited longer for decisions than we
either intended or believe corresponds to good practice, but our first concern was to
maintain the quality of editorial work even if that meant the accumulation of a backlog
until we could find a replacement colleague.
Marlies will be sorely missed, not only due to the breadth of her expertise. Her con-
tribution to the editorial team consisted always of that sort of passionate concern for
dispassionate consideration of other people’s work that helped us all form and improve
our own editorial skills. Marlies was also willing openly to reconsider positions and poli-
cies where practice revealed this as necessary, yet never such that pragmatism was
ascendant over sound principle. As our lead editor points out, one could, if the pressure
907411EJT0010.1177/1354066120907411European Journal of International RelationsEditorial
editorial2020
Editorial
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