By Deepa Das Acevedo
Editor-in-Chief, PoLAR:  Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Six years ago, a new pair of PoLAR editors observed that they were taking responsibility for the journal “in the context of a worldwide resurgence of right wing politics… and at times radical shifts in law and governance.” What was true then is also true now—as is the observation, made by the same editors back in 2019, that “PoLAR is a critical anthropological outlet for understanding this changing terrain and defining intellectual responses within it.”

The editors who made these observations, Jessica Greenberg and Jessica Winegar, were followed by Sindiso Mnisi Weeks and Georgina Ramsay. In fact, PoLAR has a long tradition of co-editorship: rarely in the almost-three decades of its history has the journal been led by a single Editor-in-Chief. This is as it should be, inasmuch as shaping the conversation in any scholarly field should be an inherently collaborative exercise—let alone in an interdisciplinary field, let alone in two interconnected interdisciplinary fields, as with our journal. I am equal parts happy and relieved to say that this tradition of collaborative editing continues with PoLAR today. Although the title of Editor-in-Chief is now held by me alone, the privilege and the responsibility of guiding our shared scholarly home rest with a newly instituted Editorial Board.

PoLAR’s new Editorial Board is different in both structure and purpose from prior entities with the same name. Whereas earlier boards numbered one dozen or more members, the new Board is small: a voting roster of no more than seven and no fewer than five Associate Editors. Earlier board members were loosely involved in journal operations, but the new Board oversees the journal’s core functions of manuscript review and policy development. Every article evaluated since January 1, 2025 has been evaluated by this new Editorial Board, and every decision letter issued since then has been guided by the Board’s input. The policies and practices we are now developing so that they can be memorialized and provided to (and changed by) future editorial administrations are being developed with the insight and advice of this Board.

Put simply, this Board is PoLAR in every way that matters, and working alongside each of its members is already proving to be one of the most enjoyable and inspiring professional experiences of my career. The Associate Editors of PoLAR for 2025 are, in alphabetical order: Hayal Akarsu, Matthew Canfield, Monica Eppinger, Jeff Kahn, Meghan Morris, Mayur Suresh, and Riaz Tejani. If I am very very lucky, I will continue to work with this talented and committed team of colleagues throughout my editorship.

While the Associate Editors are responsible for evaluating manuscripts and reviewer reports and for developing journal policy, they are accompanied and helped by a broader circle of colleagues who make up the entirety of PoLAR’s new Editorial Board. Foremost among them is Jennifer Curtis, who also goes by title of Associate Editor for PoLAR Online but who, in reality, is equal parts editorial whisperer and institutional spirit, and without whom I would have already made many mistakes. Our book reviews section is now led by Jeffrey Omari and Neil Kaplan-Kelly, who bring a wealth of topical, theoretical, geographic, and disciplinary expertise and who participate in the Board’s monthly meetings and contribute to all its processes in addition to their work for the Reviews section. Shalini Iyengar, the first occupant of PolAR’s new early career Scholarship Liaison role, makes it possible to run our journal in a way that is timely and tailored; if our readers are more willing to become reviewers and if our authors are consequently receiving more tailored feedback, it is because of Shalini. Behind the scenes, Stephanie Custer continues to manage our editorial workflow in a way that is aligned with our journal’s needs—and, importantly, that is made possible through the extraordinary generosity of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

This Editorial Board, which meets monthly as a matter of course (and right now also conducts biweekly asynchronous votes—they are hardworking folks!) is further supported by a larger Advisory Board. PoLAR’s new Advisory Board is a more direct descendant of its earlier editorial boards: it is a community of fifteen to twenty scholars, both junior and senior, who share their expertise and time with the journal. Members of the Advisory Board have agreed to help identify reviewers for manuscripts under consideration and to reviewing a certain number of manuscripts themselves each year. They are the broadest layer of the infrastructure that makes the work of this journal possible.

There are, as this somewhat lengthy description conveys, a lot of exciting and important changes happening at PoLAR in terms of who is involved and how they are involved. But administrative transformations are not the only changes worth noting: there are changes in orientation and genre afoot, too. I look forward to elaborating on these developments in the first editorial essay of my tenure, which will accompany the May 2025 issue of Volume 48. For now, as a placeholder, I will merely note a few of them:

First, PoLAR has introduced a new genre called In Other Words as the first step in what is likely to be an extended journey towards translating legal and political anthropology for a broader audience. IOW columns make recently published monographs in our fields accessible around the world through short, non-technical essays synthesizing their arguments. Our first IOW, which was published on PolAR Online in January 2025, featured Daromir Rudnyckyj’s Islamic Finance.

Second, PoLAR reintroduces Directions as an Online exclusive feature. Now, Directions will be explicitly geared towards collaborative efforts that traverse the traditional (essays with short commentaries), the unusual (transcribed interviews or roundtable discussions, with introductory essays), and the unique (limitless!). All Directions collections will appear Online only, in order to facilitate the greatest range with the least logistical hardship. We look forward to this new iteration of a much beloved PoLAR feature as it provides flexible, timely, and non-paywalled options for our community to gather and exchange ideas with one another using the journal as a medium.

Finally, PoLAR engages to reinvigorate its status as a truly interdisciplinary journal. Being a venue for legal and political anthropology means sitting at the intersection of three disciplines—anthropology, law, and political science—that have, for many years, had very little to say to one another. The new Editorial Board includes an unprecedented number of dual-credentialed scholars as well as scholars housed in non-anthropology units. Whether they are reviewing manuscripts or establishing journal policy, these Board members bring a commitment to speak to other disciplines through the journal as they do every day in their workplaces.

On behalf of myself and the new Editorial and Advisory Boards of PoLAR: welcome, friends. We are excited to learn alongside you, and to find new ways of thinking about law and politics anthropologically.

Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and Associate Professor of Law at Emory University. She holds degrees in political science, law, and anthropology from Princeton University and the University of Chicago. Her research explores personhood, freedom, and agency in law. In India, she has studied the nature of democratic sovereignty. In the United States, she has explored worker autonomy.  She has published books and articles in both areas, and in both peer-reviewed and law review venues. All of her work is premised on the belief that cultural analysis and legal doctrine have much to learn from one another. Since December 1, 2024, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.