CFP to RBPI: Systemic crises of the 21stcentury - March 31st, 2021

Received from Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional

01-Sep-2020

Dear Dr. Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The 21st century is only beginning, but that it has had a turbulent start cannot be denied. Successive crises of different natures have been accumulating over the last two decades, starting with the first major financial crisis of this century, that of 2008, which had enormous social and economic consequences. Out of the political turmoil that has occurred this “short 21st century”, perhaps the main one is the weakening of the European Union’s community project, with the painful political process of Brexit. After that, political crises have intensified worldwide because of international political realignments derived from the strong emergence of conservative governments in Europe, North America, and Latin America.

Such systemic crises in politics and the economy have not been temporary or limited. Over the years, their effects have penetrated several regions around the world, while there has been a broadening of systemic crises. Humanitarian crisis appears from Sudan to Venezuela, coinciding with great activism on the part of violent social actors; refugee crises spread from Syria to Italy, across Europe, and into Latin America; environmental disasters occur from Australia and the Amazon; the latest crisis, the global public health calamity generated by the spread of Covid-19, is another cumulative crisis that has been added, with far-reaching impacts across the globe.

How have those systemic crises impacted and reconfigured changes in traditional international governance? Put differently, how do global crises impact the set of rules and norms in the form of international regimes or international organizations that govern international society? Who are the new agents of international governance, and what are their governance dynamics? How do crises generate new demands and foster new forms of global (dis)governance?

Traditional governance, that is, the set of rules that regulate the life of national and international society (in the form of regional or global multilateralism), and whose primary source of regulation is the state, has been tensioned. In the same way, societies are witnessing the emergence of new forms of formal and informal governance. The latter range from informal regional political agreements, along the lines of Prosur or the Lima Group, in Latin America, or the Frugal Four in Europe– their differences notwithstanding –, to new forms of governance generated by non-state agents working in fields such as trade, the environment, and human rights, all the way to forms of informal governance offered by transnational “outlaw” agents.

Hence, this call for papers welcomes contributions addressing how systemic crises of the 21stcentury are impacting traditional and new forms of international governance according to the following topics:

1. Changes in the concepts, practices, and methodologies of international governance approach;
2. Variations on who the agents and actors of international governance are today;
3. Pressures on traditional forms of governance organized in the way of regimes and multilateralism;
4. Transformations in regionalism brought about by international crisis;
5. The emergence of forms of informal political regionalism in the Global South driven by nationalist or conservative governments;
6. New forms of informal governance within and without the law;
7. Pressures on state governance in the field of security and their consequences;
8. Reactions of international powers to changes in formal and informal governance; and
9. Great and intermediate power responses to the challenges that have arisen in global and regional governance.

Rafael Duarte Villa (Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of São Paulo) and Haroldo Ramanzini Júnior (Associate Professor at the Institute of Economy and International Relations of the Federal University of Uberlândia) will edit the Special Issue.

All submissions should be original and unpublished, must be written in English, including an abstract which does not exceed 60 words (and 4-6 keywords in English), and follow the Chicago System. They must be in the range of 8,000 words (including title, abstract, bibliographic references, and keywords). RBPI general author’s guidelines can be found at https://www.scielo.br/revistas/rbpi/iinstruc.htm. Submissions must be made at http://www.scielo.br/rbpi (Online Submissions).

Articles can be submitted until March 31st, 2021. As a result of the collapse of public funding for the Brazilian scientific journals, especially those granted by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, RBPI had to start charging processing fees for articles approved for publication. The RBPI charges an article publication fee payable by authors whose works are accepted for publication, which is used exclusively to cover the costs of the editorial production services. Authors are encouraged to seek support from their institutions for the full or partial payment of publication fees. RBPI maintains a policy of partial waiver for publication fees, upon the availability of funds, reserved exclusively for doctoral students (they have to prove they do not have support from their Graduate Studies Programs to cover full or partial payment of the fees).

RBPI is published exclusively online at Scielo (http://www.scielo.br/rbpi), following the continuous publication model. This model gives faster publication for authors and faster access for readers because the articles are published online at the very moment their editorial production is finished. The first segment will be released in March 2021.