A New Era for Ethics & International Affairs

To the EIA community:

The editors of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of Carnegie Council, are proud to announce the beginning of a new era in our publishing history. Starting with the Spring 2023 issue, Ethics & International Affairs (EIA) will be a digital-only quarterly.

As much as we, the editors, hold a deep reverence for print, we also recognize that for many years now, our community of academics, students, organizers, and policymakers have primarily been interacting with digital versions of our content. On balance, this has meant a wider proliferation of EIA content than would otherwise have been possible, with access becoming truly global.

The decision to make this jump to a fully digital publication reflects both a recognition of present realities and an acute awareness of significant changes that are necessary to achieve a carbon neutral future. By eliminating print and its associated global distribution, EIA and Carnegie Council are taking an important step toward an environmentally sustainable planet. EIA will still be published by Cambridge University Press and will maintain the same rigorous editorial review process that has been a hallmark of the journal for decades.

As part of the transition to digital, we’re also thrilled to unveil a new website for the journal. In addition to an aesthetic overhaul, the new site will allow us to showcase the excellent work of our authors in a more user-friendly digital environment, providing easier navigation between related content, archived quarterly material, and website exclusives.

Headlining the new site is the Spring 2023 issue of the journal, featuring a symposium on nuclear ethics from Scott D. Sagan and Joseph Nye, Jr., in addition to articles and essays on ecocide, democratizing fintech, and more.

The history of the journal has been a history of transformation. When the journal was founded in 1987 it would have been near-impossible to predict many of the seismic changes that have taken place both in global politics and in academic publishing. The first issue of EIA was still firmly planted in the landscape of the Cold War, with a collection on super-power ethics leading off the volume. Over the years, as the audience and reach of the journal has expanded, so too have its areas of intellectual exploration. Articles and essays on topics such as artificial intelligence, feminist foreign policy, and climate engineering, to name but a few, have enriched our collective understanding of what can and should constitute the building blocks for a just and ethical world.

Today, as we mark both the transition to a fully digital publication and launch of the new website, we do so in a dramatically changed publishing landscape. The last few years have seen an industry-wide push toward open access publishing of academic content, with many long-held principles of the subscription model being turned upside down. The EIA editorial team has worked in partnership with our colleagues at Cambridge University Press to publish more and more of our content fully open access, without paywalls. This means wider access for scholars globally, in particular for those working at under-resourced institutions, often in the Global South. Last year, more than three quarters of all EIA articles and essays were open access.

As Ethics & International Affairs embarks on this next phase of its journey as a publication, we invite you join us—as a reader, a researcher, a contributor, or as all of the above. After all, it is only thanks to the vibrant community, both in academia and beyond, that the journal is poised to take this important next step. In partnership with the members of the EIA community, we look forward to continuing to provide a platform for some of the most urgent debates of our time, making sure that ethics retains a central place in international affairs.

Sincerely,

Joel Rosenthal, Editor-in-Chief
Adam Read-Brown, Editor
Priya Chokshi, Associate Editor