Last Spring the International Studies Association approved a new ISA journal, the Journal of Global Security Studies. I am normally pretty sanguine about new journals in the discipline but in this case I feel genuine excitement. Why? Because JOGSS is not just another outlet for scholarship but is actively positioning itself institutionally to cultivate much-needed bridges and conversation across divides within the sub-field:

“The mission of JOGSS is to publish first-rate work from across the entire range of methodological, epistemological, theoretical, normative, and empirical concerns reflected in the field of global security studies and, more importantly, encourage dialogue, engagement, and conversation across different parts of the field.”

This is important because security studies scholarship has long been siloed in a number of blocs, all largely ignoring one another. By contrast, JOGSS would put these different takes on “security” in dialogue, bringing together conventional rationalist approaches on great power politics with critical human security studies and everything in between.

This effort is reflected in the journal’s first call for proposals, which was released today to the ISA membership and is excerpted below the fold. An early special issue on “The Future of Security Studies” is envisioned, with papers cultivated through a workshop process. It’s a great opportunity for students or more advanced scholars interested in the direction in which our sub-field is headed. I hope many Duck readers will consider submitting!

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
Special Issue: The Future of Global Security (Studies)

The JoGSS editorial team calls for paper proposals to be part of the journal’s first special issue on the theme of the future of global security (studies). We are particularly interested in proposals making a strong and compelling argument about what the future of global security studies will (or should) be that explicitly engages a variety of relevant perspectives.

The editors hope to receive proposals based on ongoing work and creatively addressing some of the following questions: (1) How should we think of security? Whose security and what kind of security should we focus on? Should we be segmenting off different perspectives or exploring the links between them (or both)? (2) How should we think about global security? What are, or will be, the most pressing global security concerns and issues, and can we separate them from national or regional ones? How might we engage with all that global entails? (3) How should we study global security? What are the most promising approaches and theories, and what are the shortcomings of existing approaches in the field of security studies? How can we assemble the knowledge we have accumulated in the field to formulate and address questions in ways that do service to the wide variety of approaches?

We will invite authors of promising proposals to submit draft papers and authors of the most promising papers to a workshop from which we will craft a special issue of the journal.

Proposals (800 words) due: August 15. Please email proposals in MS Word format to Jill Hereau.
Paper invitations issued: September 1.
Draft papers (approximately 8,000 words) due: December 30.
Workshop: April 30-May 2 2015, University of Denver.