Instructions

The Global Justice & Human Rights Journal Review (GJHR Journal Review) publishes commentaries — short, 1000- to 2000-word essays addressing some aspect of a recently-published scholarly article or book in the fields of global justice and global human rights. GJHR Journal Review does not publish essays that are not commentaries on other, specific, works. Works commented upon should normally have been published within the last 3 years. Commented-upon articles may be theoretical, conceptual, or empirical in nature: there are no restrictions in that regard.

If you are in doubt, please feel free to contact the editors to discuss the suitability of your proposed commentary prior to writing it. We’d love to hear your ideas. You can email the editors at: editors@gjhr.org

Please note: In keeping with our ambition to provide timely commentary, GJHR Journal Review is committed to a fast review process. Among other things, this means that the Editors do not issue “Revise and Resubmit” decisions, which tend to result in long, drawn out publication processes. We will either accept your commentary more or less as-is, or reject it, and this generally happens all within a 45 day period.

A helpful tip: When writing a commentary on a published work, it is important that you explain the view you’re critiquing before critiquing it. Generally, you don’t want readers to feel like they need to go back and read (or re-read) the target article before reading your commentary. We think it is best if even readers new to the topic can read your commentary and learn from it enough about the target article to understand your subsequent criticisms. Please keep this in mind when preparing a commentary for submission to GJHR Journal Review.

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Authors wishing to submit a commentary to be considered for publication in BEJR should construct theirs in accordance with these guidelines:

FILE FORMAT

Manuscripts for GJHR Journal Review should be submitted in Microsoft Word (.docx or .doc) format.

LANGUAGE AND STYLE

BEJR is an English language publication. Authors may employ American, Canadian, or British English as they prefer, but should be consistent in spelling and grammar.

Articles must conform to GJHR Journal Review style, which is based loosely on the style employed by the Journal of Private Enterprise (see reference examples, below). Articles do not have to be in that style when submitted, but after an article is accepted, the author is expected to make the appropriate changes.

Authors are encouraged to use a down-to-earth style, emphasizing saying something rather than citing something.

GENERAL ORGANIZATION

A commentary submitted to GJHR Journal Review should be no more than 2000 words (less is preferred), inclusive of title, citation, abstract, main text, references, and footnotes.

The submission should include:

TITLE

Shorter is better.

CITATION

To the article commented upon.

ABSTRACT

No more than 100 words.

MAIN TEXT

Divided into paragraphs and employing no more than one level of heading.

REFERENCE LIST

No more than ten items long—inclusive of the work that is the target of the submission. Gratuitous citations should be avoided. The editors will police submissions vigorously—especially for gratuitous self-citations.

Specific examples of the GJHR Journal Review reference style:

Books

Sikkink, K. 2017. Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Publication date should appear, without parentheses, following the author. Book titles should be bolded and italicized.

Journal Articles

Georgi, F. R. 2019. “In-between Translation, Transformation and Contestation: Studying Human Rights Activism as Politics-as-Ruptures in Violent Social Conflicts.” Millennium 48(1): 3–24.

48 is the volume and (1) is the Number. Complete page numbers for the article should follow the colon without “pp”. Journal names should be bolded and italicized

Book Chapters

Langman, L., Benski T. 2019, “Global Justice Movements: Past, Present, and Future. In The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation, ed.  B. Berberoglu. Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan.

If you’re citing something not in one of the forms referenced here, ask the editors how to cite it.

A commentary submitted to GJHR Journal Review should employ:

INLINE CITATIONS

Parenthetical documentation should be used for citations. Citations should be (author year) when referring to a complete work, e.g. (Freeman 1984), (Child and Marcoux 1999), or (author year: page number) when referring to a specific point, e.g. (Hayek 1945: 521), (Norman and MacDonald 2004: 245-246). Complete page numbers for book chapters and academic articles should be included in the reference list. Works with three or more authors should be cited as (first author, et al year) or (first author, et al year: page number(s)), as appropriate.

FOOTNOTES

These should be substantive, not used for citations, kept to a bare minimum, and included at the bottom of the page denoted by Arabic numbers.

INDENTED TEXT BLOCKS

For quotations of more than three lines of text, indented text blocks should be used. Shorter quotations may be used in main text, surrounded by double quotation marks.

Frequency of submission:

Please note that, in order to promote diversity of view, GJHR will not publish 2 items by a single author consecutively, and will not publish more than 2 items by a single author within a given Volume (year).

To submit a Commentary for peer review, or to ask a question, email the editors at: eeditors@gjhr.org