The beginning of this new decade marks an important turning point in the 48-year-long history of Nationalities Papers. The journal received its first ever impact factor in the 2018 Journal Citation Reports by Clarivate Analytics. I am delighted that this happened under my editorship, and it reflects the work of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) board of directors, former editors and editorial board members, the Cambridge University Press team, and, of course, our authors and reviewers.
As a token of our appreciation to our reviewers, we will be listing their names in the journal once a year. We cannot emphasize the importance of reviewers enough since they are the ones doing the heavy lifting in the peer-review process. They safeguard the reliability of our journal by detecting flawed research and by ensuring the quality of the work we publish. They provide an invaluable service both to our multidisciplinary community and to their own particular fields of study.
People’s attentiveness to nationalism has definitely increased in many parts of the world. In this juncture, the role of journals like Nationalities Papers becomes even more critical. It is our responsibility to avoid punditry and continue to offer theoretical approaches and developing concepts, which in turn helps us understand and explain national identity formation and the politics of nationalism today. To engage with the current situation directly, we have introduced some new article categories, such as State of the Field articles, and revived some old ones, such as Analysis of Current Events.
This mix of publishing both research that is relevant to contemporary debates and cutting-edge multidisciplinary work in various social scientific fields is also reflected in last year’s winners of the Huttenbach Prize for the best article published in Nationalities Papers. Footnote 1 The winner was Kimitaka Matsuzato for his article, “Donbas War and Politics in Cities on the Front: Mariupol and Kramatorsk,” while Ota Konrád received an honorable mention for “Two Post-war Paths: Popular Violence in the Bohemian Lands and in Austria in the Aftermath of World War I.” Another way we engage contemporary developments and the fieldwork of our authors and readers is through our photo contest. We select the best photos from the field, judged in terms of their content, synthesis, and visually compelling insights about nationalism, ethnicity, or migration, and then feature them on the journal’s cover. A brief caption of how the photo relates to the scholar’s fieldwork is also published.
Furthermore, we engage broader audiences through the revamped ASN website and our social media platforms. We have published interviews with authors of State of the Field articles as well as guest editors of special issues. I encourage you to visit the ASN website (https://nationalities.org/) to read them.
Entering my second year as editor-in-chief, I would like to thank our managing editor, Danielle J. Price, for her amazing work. I also want to thank Aviel Roshwald, who is stepping down after a decade as an associate editor, as well as Myra Waterbury, who has served as our special issues’ editor during the past five years and will be stepping down in May, for their tremendous service to the journal. Finally, I would like to extend a warm welcome to two new associate editors who are joining our team, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova and Julie George. I am confident that we will continue publishing theoretically driven, empirically rich research articles, and shape the field of nationalism studies, broadly understood, for years to come.
