1 Infrastructure

PoLAR’s editorial infrastructure has been reorganized to provide for a collaborative, streamlined, and vaguely bicameral organization. What used to be called the Editorial Board (EB) is now known as the Advisory Board (AB)—so named because the mix of junior and senior colleagues it comprises provide expertise and insight to help with journal operations. PoLAR’s new AB consists of roughly 15–20 scholars who commit to 1-year terms, during which they are invited to recommend appropriate reviewers for some of our manuscripts and asked to review up to two manuscripts themselves.

What is now called the EB is a smaller group that is more centrally involved in the direction and operations of the journal. Seven associate editors participate in a monthly synchronous meeting to issue decisions on all manuscripts that have received external reviews as well as to develop journal policy. They are, in alphabetical order by surname, Hayal Akarsu, Matthew Canfield, Monica Eppinger, Jeffrey Kahn, Meghan Morris, Mayur Suresh, and Riaz Tejani. (Right now, this group is working double time by also voting through a biweekly poll; they have my profound gratitude and deserve all the coffee, candy, or words of thanks that you may wish to send their way.) These associate editors are joined by Jennifer Curtis, our longtime associate editor for PoLAR Online; by our new book reviews editors Neil Kaplan-Kelly and Jeffrey Omari; and by Shalini Iyengar, our inaugural scholarship liaison.

This EB works hard to provide timely and thoughtful decisions on manuscripts that are submitted to PoLAR. It is also working to establish a measure of uniformity in evaluative processes and to reduce the time-to-publish (for authors) as well as the number of reviews requested (for reviewers). For instance, the EB has adopted a loose policy of asking, during a first round of evaluation, whether authors are likely to be able to adequately address the changes requested by reviewers and by the EB itself within a single round of revision. This policy is not ironclad, and it may be adjusted or abandoned. For the time being, however, it provides the EB with a shared evaluative framework, and, if it persists, the policy will establish an understanding of the journal’s evaluative process for prospective authors.

As we move forward, the EB will develop a broader range of policies regarding review standards for articles at various stages of the process, for collaborative publication efforts, and for guidelines to share with reviewers and authors alike. During the first 6 months of our tenure, however, policy-setting has taken a backseat to the work of expediting manuscript evaluation and adjusting to changes in production and process. The EB’s hard work combined with the publication changes has produced a truly massive May 2025 issue—roughly double the size of recent issues!—and we have every expectation of continuing this trend for the foreseeable future.

2 Publication Cycle

As part of the AAA portfolio that is published by Wiley, PoLAR works within a menu of options established by entities other than the journal itself. One of the most significant recent changes stemming from this arrangement is PoLAR’s shift to a publication cycle called continuous publication. Continuous publication eliminates the EarlyView stage of an article’s life cycle. Articles are published in an issue with final citation information as soon as they are ready. Our communications with Wiley suggest that all portfolio journals will shift to continuous publication by 2026; PoLAR simply chose to make transition sooner to coincide with the 2024 editorial handover. Below, I’ll highlight three implications of our move to continuous publication.

First, there is no more issue curation by the journal’s editorial leadership. Articles appear in the order in which they were published as soon as they complete the editorial and production processes. Once a particular issue has closed (based on a predetermined date), no further articles will appear in it, and all subsequently completed articles will appear in the next issue. If 10 articles are ready before the issue closing date, that issue will have 10 articles; if only four articles are ready, there will be only four articles.

Previously, editors would have the ability to hold completed articles over for publication in later issues and to arrange the order in which articles appear within a given issue. Neither of these is possible under a continuous publication model. This editorial discretion is certainly something that is lost, and the editors of some AAA portfolio journals have expressed reasonable hesitations about it. Nevertheless, I am skeptical that this change constitutes a true loss, given the relative infrequency with which many of us now read journal issues “cover to cover” or impute any significance to the order in which articles appear within an issue.

Second, given the end of issue curation, editors operating under a continuous publication model can no longer guarantee that articles in a “special section” will appear in the same issue. Instead, special sections will consist of articles gathered virtually and accessible as a collection from the journal’s homepage regardless of the actual issues in which they appear.

Ordinarily, this would mean that special section collectives that are intent on having all their articles appear in the same issue would be responsible for coordinating timing among their contributing authors. However, PoLAR has placed a temporary pause on accepting any new special section proposals until the EB is able to develop clear guidelines for potential section editors. We hope to do this before the end of 2025 because we understand that collaborative publication efforts are a valuable and increasingly popular way for our colleagues to engage with one another. For the time being, however, PoLAR’s pause on special sections means that the obligation to coordinate copyediting and production among contributing authors is, at most, a concern for editors of the legacy special sections that the current EB inherited and has committed to publishing.

Third, the move to continuous publication eliminates any remaining pretense that, when it comes to standard (meaning: nonspecial section) journal issues, editorial essays like this one announce curated, internally cohesive collections of scholarship. As with many peer journals, PoLAR editorial introductions have, for some time now, consisted of a direct-to-reader communication by the editors and a summary of the articles included in that issue. Continuous publication allows the “introductory” function of editorial essays to be put to rest, at long last. Although this is probably the least important consequence of the move to continuous publication from the perspective of authors and readers, it is one of the most important for me. I look forward to engaging with you directly, to communicating news regarding the journal without having to present that news as a precursor to the “true” introductory function of the editorial essay, and, finally, I look forward to letting the articles we publish speak for themselves.

3 Genre

But wait—there’s more!

It has been one of the unlooked-for pleasures of my role that, thanks to IOW, I not only get to learn about exciting new scholarship in legal and political anthropology, but I also get to work with authors via a low-stakes, quick-turnover process that allows them to approach their research anew and to play with authorial voice. I hope and expect that suggestions from our authors and readers, along with insights from our Advisory and Editorial Boards, will allow PoLAR to continue developing new ways of communicating anthropological insights. The insights anthropologists can offer are valuable only insofar as they reach outside our immediate intellectual community. PoLAR is ideally positioned to facilitate this work.

4 Conclusion

This is, as I began by saying, yet another challenging moment in American higher education. It is also a particularly fraught time around the world. Anthropologists of law and politics have granular, nuanced, critical insights to offer that are particularly worth sharing at this moment. It is my privilege to contribute to this effort, but the real work is being done by the exceptionally hardworking members of PoLAR’s EB, its supportive network of AB members, and by the countless reviewers and authors who contribute their expertise and their time to our shared enterprise. Thank you all; I look forward to working with and for you in the years to come.

Deepa Das Acevedo, Emory University, is Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR:  Political and Legal Anthropology Review.