Aims and Scope

International Theory invites authors to submit original theoretically oriented articles on the positive, legal, and/or normative aspects of world politics, or on the history of the development of ideas relating to the field of International Relations. Because International Theory is multidisciplinary with a broad intended audience, contributions must be as accessible as possible to readers from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions. International Theory does not publish papers that are primarily empirical, policy oriented, or focused on country- or region-specific concerns without an international, transnational, or global dimension.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Rejoinder**
• Symposium Article*
• Forum Article*
• Book Symposium Article*
• Discussion**
• Meeting Report**
• Reply**
• Article Commentary**

* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver. 

** No APCs are required for these article types.

Regular Research Articles can be up to 15,000 words (including notes and bibliography), although authors will typically be required to trim their papers to fewer than 12,000 words before publication.

Criteria for Preparing Symposia for International Theory

International Theory welcomes proposals for fora or symposia, although, owing to space constraints, invitations to submit complete fora or symposia will be issued very selectively upon receipt of proposals. To propose a forum or symposium, download the interactive PDF and email the completed form to InternationalTheory@cambridge.org. The form is available here.

Please bear in mind the following guidelines:

• A forum is typically 15,000 words long and will have 3–5 contributors. A forum has no separate introduction, but the first contribution will frame the collection as a whole. A forum is treated as a single co-authored piece: it has a single abstract and a single DOI, but separately identifiable contributions.
• A symposium is typically 30,000–40,000 words long and will normally have 3–5 papers and a separate Introduction. Individual papers will usually be under 8,000 words in length. Organizers of symposia may divide up the space as they see fit, provided they stay within the overall word limit. The symposium as a whole will have an abstract; each individual contribution will also have an abstract; and each individual contribution will have its own unique DOI.
• Whether forum or symposium, the topic must be of interest to a broad spectrum of our readership, ideally cutting across at least two of our three target audiences—IR theory, international legal theory, and international political theory (IPT). We are open to proposals that focus on a single theoretical approach (e.g., critical theory, constructivism, rationalism) as well as proposals that cut across theoretical approaches. In either case, however, articles should be written to be of interest to (and accessible by) the broadest possible readership across theoretical communities.
• As is the case with regular research articles, fora and symposia must offer an original contribution to international theory, significantly contribute to the development of existing international theory, and/or significantly contribute to our understanding of the development of International Relations as a field.
• Proposals can be organized around themes or books, but, if the latter, the book(s) in question must have already had a demonstrable impact on the field as indicated, for example, by major awards or unusually high rates of citation. Book symposia will ordinarily be no longer than 30,000 words.
• Individual contributions should speak to each other in some significant way, such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Explicit cross-references among contributions are encouraged.
• Symposium organizers should take care to include a diversity of voices and perspectives.
• All contributions will be peer reviewed, usually as a package, although papers will be judged individually as well (i.e., the Editors reserve the right to accept only a subset of the submitted papers). Symposium organizers should submit a set of properly anonymized papers to enable anonymous review. For example, if the papers reference each other, those references should be done by some formula such as ‘Paper B, this symposium’ rather than by using the author’s name.

Prospective organizers should feel free to discuss their proposals in advance with the Editors, but in any case must submit a proposal form that will undergo preliminary review for suitability.

Preparing your article for submission

IT will review articles up to 15,000 words (including notes and bibliography), although authors will typically be required to trim their papers to fewer than 12,000 words before publication. Please include a word count with submission, along with an abstract of approximately 200 words (which is not repeated from the paper itself) and a keywords section. For guidance on how to prepare your abstract and keywords for submission, please see below.

The IT Reference Style is based on The Chicago Manual of Style and uses footnotes rather than in-text citations. Citations in footnotes should be limited to author’s family name and date (but use Ibid. for a repeat citation to the immediately preceding source), with complete bibliographic information appearing in a list of references at the end of the article. Add specific page numbers in the footnote when quoting from or referring to a particular passage or when a citation refers to a narrow claim rather than the overall argument of a cited work. Besides using the author-date system for other references, authors may substitute the European Journal of International Law guidelines for referencing legal documents. Either way, titles of journals should not be abbreviated in the list of references or in the footnotes (legal articles).

NOTE: Where a journal page range is e.g. 265-290 this should be typeset as 265-90.

The reference list should contain the complete facts of publication or availability for each source cited, using the formats shown in the examples below. Include only those sources specifically cited in the text. Provide first names, rather than initials, of authors when available. For article and book titles, use title case. List sources in alphabetical order by the first author’s surname; list multiple works by the same author in chronological order with earliest dates first. Separate all page numbers in notes and lists of references with en-dashes rather than hyphens. Tables and figures should be placed on separate pages at the end of the article with their desired location indicated in the text. As recent research has shown there to be a gender citation gap in International Relations we ask you to be mindful of this when preparing your submission.

This journal publishes in accordance with Cambridge University Press’s publishing ethics guidelines, which apply to authors, peer reviewers, the editorial office and the journal as a whole.

Please use the following formats:

BOOK: Williams, Michael C. 2005. The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FOOTNOTE: Williams 2005, 52.

EDITED COLLECTION: Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, ed. 2013. Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR. Abingdon: Routledge. FOOTNOTE: Adler-Nissen 2013.

CHAPTER IN MULTIAUTHOR COLLECTION: Merrit, Richard L., and Dina A. Zinnes. 1989. “Alternative Indexes of National Power.” In Power in World Politics, edited by Richard J. Stoll and Michael D. Ward, 11–28. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publications. FOOTNOTE: Merrit and Zinnes 1989, 21.

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Kinsella, Helen M. 2019. “Sex as the Secret: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.” International Theory 11 (1): 26–47. FOOTNOTE: Kinsella 2019, 32–3.

WORKING PAPER: Weller, Christoph. 2001. “Feindbilder. Ansätze und Probleme ihrer Erforschung.” Working Paper 22. Bremen: Universität Bremen/Institut für Interkulturelle und Internationale Studien (InIIS). FOOTNOTE: Weller 2001, 10.

PAPER PRESENTED AT A MEETING: Sárváry, Katalin. 1998. “István Bibó (1943-1944): On the Equilibrium and Peace of Europe.” Paper presented at the 3^rd Pan-European Conference on International Relations, SGIR-ISA, September, Vienna, Austria. FOOTNOTE: Sárváry 1998, 4.

GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT: U.S. Senate. 1984. Committee on Foreign Relations. Chemical Warfare: Arms Control and Nonproliferation. Joint Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Government Processes. 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 28 June. FOOTNOTE: U.S. Senate 1984.

NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE ARTICLE: Article titles and authors are omitted except when op-eds or guest contributions: Soros, George. “Bush’s Inflated Sense of Supremacy.” Financial Times, 12 March 2003. FOOTNOTE: Soros 2003. Otherwise, no entry in the reference list is needed; instead, include relevant information in a footnote: Le Monde, 13 September 2009, 5.

PUBLICATION DISTRIBUTED ELECTRONICALLY: In addition to the usual information, please list the service name, the name of the vendor or website providing the service, the URL if material was accessed on the Internet, date material was accessed, and any identifying numbers. Goldberg, Jeffrey. 2016. “World Chaos and World Order: Conversations with Henry Kissinger.” The Atlantic. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/kissinger-order-and-chaos/506876/. Accessed 8 December 2016. FOOTNOTE: Goldberg 2016.

UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW: No entry in the reference list is needed; instead, include relevant information in a footnote: Author’s interview with Christine Lagarde, Washington, DC, July 2015.

UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT: Brown, Chris. 1998. “Cultural Pluralism and International Political Theory.” Unpublished manuscript, Southampton University/London School of Economics. FOOTNOTE: Brown 1998.

DISSERTATION: Chamon, Paulo Henrique de Oliveira. 2018. “The Mood of Time(s): Melancholia and the Limits of Temporal Thinking in World Politics.” PhD diss., Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontificía Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. FOOTNOTE: Chamon 2018, chapter 3.

For questions of style not answered here, please refer to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., or contact the editorial office of IT.

Abstract and Keywords

Abstracts and keyword sections are required for all submissions to IT. For guidance on how to prepare your abstracts and keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

As part of the submission process, authors will be asked to upload a title page with author details that will not be included in reviewers’ copies of the manuscript. Please include on this document a complete list of people whose assistance you would like to acknowledge.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

• to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s).
• to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
• to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript.
• must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see Funding statement above).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].