Call for Papers
There are a great many areas in which Beyond Intractability's currently available materials are more limited than we would like. In order to help fill these gaps, we are encouraging the submission of materials (particularly by practitioners and graduate students, though we certainly welcome submissions from faculty!) for potential publication on Beyond Intractability.
Practitioners: Conflict and peace practitioners commonly have much to contribute to the field's overall knowledge base, but lack an easy opportunity to publish their ideas. We welcome practitioners to send us their thoughtful reflections on their practice. We also have a Practitioner Interview Program, through which we interview practitioners with interesting and useful experiences who would rather talk about them than write about them. If you would like to be interviewed, let us know, and we'll set something up by phone, Skype, or in person, depending on where you are. You can even tell us what you'd like to talk about, so there won't be surprises. Many of the people we have interviewed have told us they really enjoyed it -- they, too, learned a lot in the process, and they hear from a lot of people who learned about them through BI!
Graduate Students: Every year, countless hours of creative energy are wasted by graduate students who could do truly useful research, but instead wind up channeling those talents toward "write, grade, and throw away" papers. We encourage graduate students to write -- and instructors to assign -- papers and projects that help advance the field, while simultaneously meeting students' and teachers' immediate learning objectives.
Types of Submissions We Seek:
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"Encyclopedic" or Theoretical Essays: These form the "backbone" of BI -- they are prominently presented to visitors when they browse the Knowledge Base. These essays seek to provide a succinct, generally accessible, jargon-free, comprehensive overview of each of the field's "core ideas". These essays are also supplemented with links to 10-15 more in-depth "Additional Resource" materials to try to strike a balance between understandability, brevity, and comprehensiveness. We see these essays as the fastest and most efficient way of transmitting the field's core insights to a much broader audience. If there is an existing essay (or set of essays) that you think could be improved -- or an area where we do not yet have an essay -- we would welcome your work to correct these shortcomings. (Most of the BI essays were written around 2002-2004, so they all need review and potential updating. Team members are also working on this effort, though, so if you are interested in volunteering to update an essay, please let us know which one, and we will let you know if it is "available". )
We are also interested in submissions of entirely new essays. We will entertain essays on any topic related to intractable (or difficult) conflicts, but have identified the following gaps we specifically seek to fill:
- Ways of dealing with demographic pressures (i.e., immigration, emigration, refugees, IDPs)
- Nonviolent ways of addressing minority group grievances
- Intersections of economic/development policies, political policies, and conflict/peace
- Internal human rights policy
- External human rights policy (i.e., R2P vs. sovereignty)
- Security dilemmas; security strategy; and non-military, "soft power" approaches to insurgency and terrorism
- Role of elite, midlevel, and grassroots leadership in governance and peacebuilding
- Environmental pressures, conflict, and governance
- Global partnerships for peacebuilding and/or development
- Peacebuilding activities of civil society
- Non-state (civil society and/or commercial society) governance processes for peace
- Alternative approaches to the right to self-determination
- Systemic and Complexity-oriented approaches to conflict transformation and peacebuilding.
Style Guidelines for Essays are available here.
The submission/review process for all materials is described here.
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Case Studies, Personal Reflections, and Peacebuilder Profiles: Other important components of the Knowledge Base include our Case Studies (written primarily by outsiders) and Personal Reflections (written primarily by people involved in a conflict). These tell the story of the events surrounding a particular conflict at a particular time and place (or over a particular period of time.) If we are to use these kinds of articles, however, they need to be more than news stories that will quickly go out of date. Rather, they need to be analytical -- illustrating and highlighting lessons learned about a particular kind of intervention, or giving an analysis of the causes or dynamics of a situation that will have relevance to scholars and/or practitioners over a long period of time, even after the facts on the ground are very different. Also needed are Peacebuilder Profiles describing how specific individuals or organizations have worked or are currently working to promote more constructive approaches to difficult conflict situations. Again, these should have lessons that are, at least to some extent, generalizable -- they need to suggest good approaches to emulate.
These accounts can be controversial, of course, since different people usually have very different persepctives, even on the "facts" of a conflict situation. Still, they offer an invaluable window into how theoretical ideas play out in the real world and what the nature of intractable conflicts are. Our goal is to assemble and link to an increasingly large collection of case studies, personal reflections, and profile materials, in the belief that they collectively offer an increasingly accurate (or at least provocative) view of events.
Style Guidelines for Case Studies, Personal Reflections and Peacebuilder Profiles are available here.
The submission/review process for all materials is described here.
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Book Summaries: In addition to writing theoretical papers or case studies, graduate students can also easily help build BI by writing book summaries or reviews of books they are reading already for their courses. If you are reading a book carefully and taking notes on it, it shouldn't be that much more work to write those notes up in a form that is not only useful to you, but useful to many, many more people who use BI. (We get a lot of use of our book summaries by people in the Third World who do not have access to books, but can access the Web.) Since we haven't been funded sufficiently to pay for book summaries recently, our book summary project is lagging. We hope many students will help us supplement our current holdings with summaries of the many books that we do not yet have in the system. You will get a publication out of it, and everyone using the site (100,000+ people/month) will get the benefit of your work!
Style Guidelines for Book Summaries are available here.
The submission/review process for all materials is described here.
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User Guides and Checklists: Beyond Intractability User Guides and Diagnostic Checklists are designed to help users overcome "information overload" -- a continuing problem for large-scale knowledge bases. These User Guides can be thought of as annotated course syllabi, which seek to guide users to the information that they really need to know in order to master a particular subtopic in BI, such as humanitarian aid, transitional justice, or identity conflicts. Each User Guide is built around an outline of available knowledge in a particular area, with sections highlighting and introducing the big ideas that people really ought to understand. Accompanying these ideas are links to Beyond Intractability internal and external resources that provide more in-depth information on each topic and subtopic. Accompanying these links are short descriptions explaining what is useful about each resource. Checklists take a somewhat different format: They are lists of questions or things that particular user groups (practitioners, particularly) should think about as they try to engage in constructive conflict resolution. They, too, then link to BI essays and external resources that users can read if they need more information to answer any particular question.
Style Guidelines for User Guides and Checklists are available here.
The submission/review process for all materials is described here.
Review and Acceptance Process
Since the Call for Papers is presently unfunded (though we are actively seeking financial support), we have organized it around a cooperative, mutually supportive structure that keeps costs affordable.
- If you are interested in submitting a paper or other material, please contact us with your topic idea(s) to find out how likely it is that we will be able to use your work.
- If you are a student, please review your work carefully prior to submitting it; ensure that it is well-written, understandable, and carefully proofed. We strongly urge you to find someone else to check your work as well. This is especially important for those students whose primary language is not English. (If you want to write in a language other than English, let us know and we may be able to accomodate you -- we are exploring options for supporting papers in other languages.)
- At this time, we do not have resources for outside editing, but we have implemented a true "peer-review" process. That means that before we post most papers that we receive, we send them out to two of your peers (other people who have submitted papers) for review. We also ask you to review two other people's papers.
- If you are not a native English speaker, you do not need (and probably should not) copy edit the language of papers you are reviewing. But you can indicate which parts of the paper are confusing if any, which ideas need more explanation or defense, if the organization makes sense, etc. If you are a good writer, copy-editing also would be welcome. Please use MS Word or Open Office's "track changes" and "comment" utilities to show your suggested changes and comments.
- Reviewers should send their comments on the papers back to the BI editors within 2 weeks if possible, and then BI will return the reviews to the author.
- The author will be given the opportunity to revise the paper before it is considered for publication. You are not required to follow all the suggestions, but we hope you will follow the ones that seem useful.
- Once you have a revised paper, BI will make a decision about posting status. We may post it permanently, or we may post it provisionally. BI Readers will be asked to comment on provisional papers, and a decision to make the paper permanent, request further revisions, or withdraw it will be made in several months after more comments have been received.
- In cases where papers are also being submitted for a class grade, we ask that the instructor reviews the paper and helps students improve it, if necessary, before it is submitted it to BI.
- Please submit all materials in a Microsoft Word-compatible (.doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf) file format, using very simple text formatting (simple paragraphs, headings, boldface, italics, underlining, and images that can be easily "screen-captured" for online presentation).
- Use endones, not footnotes, and use the Word (or Open Office) footnote utility. That transfers pretty easily into online formatting. Paranthetical footnotes do not.
- We ask (but do not necessarily require) that all bibliographic citations be submitted in the .ris file format, which can be exported from either Zotero or Endnote. If you are not using one these two systems, you really should. Zotero is free and makes the process of writing research papers vastly easier.
- Please contact us if you have questions!
