Volume 48, Issue 2

Letter from the Editor May 2025

Welcome, friends. It continues to be both a challenging time in higher education and an important time to be an anthropologist of law and politics. PoLAR, for its part, has had a busy and productive summer, some highlights of which I share with you in this letter.

1 Infrastructure

I am deeply grateful that the roster of our fantastic Editorial Board (EB) has continued unchanged. Our seven original associate editors are, in alphabetical order by surname, Hayal Akarsu, Matthew Canfield, Monica Eppinger, Jeffrey Kahn, Meghan Morris, Mayur Suresh, and Riaz Tejani. Our book review editors remain Neil Kaplan-Kelly and Jeffrey Omari. Jennifer Curtis has been seamlessly continuing her work leading PoLAR Online. And our Scholarship Liaison, Shalini Iyengar, continues to be of invaluable help to me in the many tasks required to keep the journal running. I will continue to acknowledge the members of this team in each editorial letter I write because I could not—and would not want to—do this work without them.

Although our roster remains the same, we have made two changes to how its members work together.

First, although Neil and Omari remain our book review editors and oversee the journal’s work in that area, they have also formally become full participants in the task of manuscript evaluation. Neil and Omari bring valuable topical and geographic range to the EB’s expertise and thoughtful analysis to our discussions. They are exceptional colleagues and committed supporters of the journal, and I am profoundly thankful to have their help. While this adjustment in how we incorporate their perspectives involves no change to their titles and will be several months old by the time this letter is published, I want to officially acknowledge it here and to thank them for the additional service they are performing.

Second, since May 2025, the EB has been voting on manuscripts in three panels of three. This approach greatly increases the EB’s decision-making capacity, which allows us to reduce the processing time experienced by authors. It ameliorates the burden on individual EB members—which had been growing to unsustainable levels due to our aforementioned commitment to reducing processing times. Kindness to authors and kindness to editors are not mutually exclusive priorities, even if it sometimes seems that way.

I offer some more insight about what the panel format means for the workflow of manuscript evaluation later in this letter. As with most of the changes we are making, this approach is currently in a trial stage that will continue through our September discussions; we will likely keep tinkering with the format during this period. However, while I can envision the panel compositions (which have stayed fixed during the trial run) being changed in the interests of either functionality or novelty, I’m reasonably confident that the format itself will continue for the duration of this editorial administration because of how it allows us to balance author needs with editor constraints.

2 Manuscript Evaluation

The mechanics of manuscript evaluation are another aspect of journal operations that continue to change. While the near-constant adjustments to our evaluative process have been challenging even for members of the editorial team—to say nothing of our authors—we are confident that these changes are being undertaken for good reason and in good faith, and thankfully, that the pace at which changes are made is slowing.Soon after this EB began its work, we realized that there were several manuscripts that had been stuck in the pipeline for an extended period—many manuscripts had initial submission dates from 2023 (and some were from 2022). I want to be clear that there are no bad actors in this story: peer reviewers and editors do their work for free and on top of their many other personal and paid professional obligations. Authors also have many obligations and have, in recent years, faced a series of unprecedented obstacles to pursuing their scholarly goals; it is not always possible to return revisions in a timely way. But three years is at least two years too many.The EB has instituted some adjustments to reduce bottlenecks in this process without significantly changing PoLAR’s scholarly mission and standards. First, we now only require two external reviews for initial (R0) manuscripts instead of three. Finding any three reviewers is hard; finding three reviewers whose expertise ensures fair and productive evaluation within a relatively small subfield like legal and political anthropology is harder, and ensuring that those reviewers respond in a timely way is harder still. Since each manuscript that undergoes external review also undergoes review by a panel of the EB, it effectively receives three more sets of insights. That is plenty.Second, for broadly similar reasons, we now generally do not send out revised manuscripts (R1s and the like) for additional rounds of external review. Just as we are confident about the adequacy of five perspectives at the R0 stage, we are confident about the adequacy of three perspectives at the R1 stage. Additionally, it is often hard to secure the same reviewers for a revised manuscript, which means that authors have often been experiencing multiple rounds of R0-type analysis. Meanwhile, from the journal’s perspective, we were burning through our pool of potential reviewers. The EB is mindful that, occasionally, we may want a second round of external review: this new rule—which is still in its trial run—is a default position rather than an invariable practice.Finally, a word about the panels themselves. As I mentioned earlier, we have three panels of three, which allows us to evaluate more manuscripts without unreasonably increasing the burden on an already hardworking Board. (I do not sit on any of the panels: my role, as before, is to facilitate and synthesize the EB’s exchanges.) Our initial panel compositions were more or less randomly determined—not alphabetically or by any other strictly random approach, but also without particular dynamics or demographics in mind. Panel members do not—to my knowledge, anyway—discuss their assigned manuscripts in advance of our votes, but they do share their thoughts and engage in some discussion in front of the entire EB during our meetings. This allows the entire EB to learn about all the journal’s submissions, including submissions they did not read during the current round. It also allows EB members to learn their colleagues’ evaluative styles, which helps build a sense of cohesiveness within the Board. To be sure, having three editors on each panel reduces the odds of a stalemate, but it doesn’t eliminate the possibility: we have already encountered situations where there is no consensus within a given panel. When that happens, our evolving practice has been to ask a fourth editor (from a different panel) to cast something approximating a tie-breaking vote.Like everything else we are doing, the panel system is experimental and subject to alteration. We are still learning, and we are happy to keep doing so. But I think that the panel system will persist in some form because, so far, it has been helping us help our colleagues on and off the Editorial Board.

3 Genre and Publication

I want to close with far more abbreviated discussions of two topics that I touched on in my first editorial letter and that I will likely reprise at greater length in my next letter.On genre, I am very happy to announce that In Other Words (IOW)—the new public-facing genre run jointly by Jennifer Curtis and me and published via PoLAR Online—is thriving. We have settled into a pattern of releasing one new IOW per month to allow each one sufficient airtime. I hope to see many more of you submit IOW columns—please send them to me directly at dda.polar@gmail.com—because I am excited to share your scholarship with a broader, non-paywalled audience. It’s a fun and quick process: try it!On publication, I want to remind the PoLAR community that Continuous Publication makes it impossible for the journal to “hold” contributions for specific issues. This is not, as I mentioned in my first letter, much of a problem for freestanding research articles, but it is a concern for collective publication efforts—which, I am pleased to say, the journal will soon start accepting again. We recently revised our collective publications policy, and by the time this editorial is published, we may well have finalized and released it. Regardless of when our new policy is made public or what its specifics ultimately end up being, I can say with certainty that one of its features will be an expectation that guest editors play an active role in managing the collective efforts they propose—including by coordinating the timed release of contributors’ drafts so that they all appear in the same issue.Finally, I want to foreshadow greater information in my next letter on publication arrangements for the journal going forward. As many of you may know, the AAA is preparing for the conclusion of its contract with Wiley and has been working with portfolio journals to plan next steps. PoLAR has been fortunate to work with both the AAA and with the leaders of other AAA journals in thinking through our own preferences and options. While it is far too early to offer any insight as to what lies ahead for PoLAR—indeed, I have no insight to offer at this moment—I hope to have enough clarity by May of 2026 to share something here with you.

4 Conclusion

This continues to be an exciting and productive period at PoLAR, if also a busy one. I understand that it can be unsettling to encounter so much change in so short a time—particularly during a period when everything seems to be changing (and for the worse!). I want to reiterate here, at a general level, the apologies I have already made to those of you who have been inconvenienced by the flux in our systems. We are doing our best to minimize negative consequences, but we don’t always get it right the first time. But I also want to reiterate that the EB and I are implementing these changes and working overtime in the process because we believe that you have important insights to share and that you deserve fair, fast, and reliable ways to share them. Write on.

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