About Alternatives Global Local Political

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

Alternatives, published in full as Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, is a peer-reviewed journal of political science and international relations published by SAGE Publications since 1975. It is one of the longest-running homes of critical international-relations scholarship in the English language: a quarterly that was founded, in the middle of the Cold War, by scholars who thought the conventional study of world politics was missing the things that mattered most — the dangers of great-power confrontation, the need for less imperious and more sustainable forms of development, and the implications of the process that was only then acquiring the name globalisation. Half a century later the journal still defines itself by the question in its subtitle: how do global forces and local political life remake each other?

The identity of this record requires care, because the journal travels under a short name and a long name at once. The JournalsWorld record for this post gives the title in its expanded form, Alternatives Global Local Political, the publisher SAGE Publishing, and the ISSN pair 0304-3754 and 2163-3150. SAGE's own journal pages give the same identifiers, with 0304-3754 as the print ISSN and 2163-3150 as the online ISSN, and the same description of the journal's field and history. Those numbers, not the single word Alternatives, are the safe anchor: many unrelated periodicals share that ordinary English word in their titles, including journals in other disciplines and other countries, and at least one of them is also published by SAGE in a different subject area. Check the ISSN before you cite, submit or subscribe.

A second identity fact belongs in this profile from the start. JournalsWorld carries another thin record, titled simply Alternatives, whose ISSN pair is identical to this record's pair, in reverse order. Both records describe the same SAGE journal: same publisher, same two ISSNs, same coverage beginning in 1975. This profile is written for the present record, under the journal's full title, and the pair is flagged in the worker report for this batch as a duplicate pair and merge candidate. Readers who arrive through the shorter-titled record are reading about the same journal.

Origins and history

SAGE's own account of the journal's founding is the authoritative short version. Alternatives was established in 1975 by scholars concerned, on one side, with the more obvious dangers of the Cold War and, on the other, with the need for less imperious and more sustainable forms of development. In both contexts it focused on the implications of what was then just coming to be called globalisation, and it published many analyses that read at the time as dissenting and have since become conventional wisdom. That origin story explains the journal's enduring character better than any scope list can: it was not founded to service a sub-discipline's internal conversation, but to challenge the assumptions of the field from a position that took the experience of the wider world — including the developing world — as its starting point.

The journal is published in association with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India, an institutional link that matches its intellectual history. A journal of world politics anchored partly outside the North Atlantic academy was, in 1975, a distinctive thing, and the association remains a visible marker of the journal's intention to hear arguments made from many parts of the world rather than about them.

Across five decades the journal has sustained quarterly publication, and its citation-database coverage runs continuously from 1975 to the present. Its editorship has passed through successive scholars of critical international relations; its current editor-in-chief, as listed by SAGE, is Lacin Idil Oztig of Yıldız Technical University. That a journal founded in the era of détente is now edited from Istanbul is itself a small illustration of the shift in the geography of international-relations scholarship that the journal spent its life arguing for.

What the journal publishes

SAGE describes Alternatives as committed to publishing peer-reviewed articles that cover the entire field of political science and international relations. The areas it names are foreign policies, security policies, political theory, comparative politics, environmental politics, peace studies, conflict resolution, globalisation and terrorism. Alongside that breadth sits the journal's distinctive brief: it aims to cover articles that explore the possibilities of new forms of political practice and identity under increasingly global conditions, and its editors focus on the changing relationships between local political practices and identities and emerging forms of global economy, culture and policy.

The combination is the point. Breadth without the distinctive brief would make Alternatives a general journal among many; the brief without breadth would make it a sectarian one. Instead the journal asks a general field's questions with a particular insistence: that prevailing assumptions about political life within and between states are being challenged by the reshaping of relations between global and local, and between universality and particularity, and that good scholarship should engage contemporary political problems in a way that speaks to the circumstances of people living in many different parts of the world while maintaining theoretical rigour, empirical precision and a culturally sensitive imagination. Those three demands — rigour, precision and imagination — recur in the journal's self-description and are a fair guide to what its reviewers reward.

In practical terms, the journal's territory can be mapped into clusters. One cluster is critical security: militarisation, counter-terrorism, borders and boundaries, and the politics of protection and harm — including recent special-issue work on the defence and military adaptation of Gulf states in an era of declining United States predominance. A second cluster is global governance and political economy: how authority is exercised above, below and across the state, and how global economic processes land in particular places. A third is identity and community: how political identities are formed, performed and contested under global conditions, from nationalism to the politics of belonging in specific regions — a strand visible in recent work on Northeast India, among other cases. A fourth is peace and conflict: peacebuilding and its failures, including a recent special-issue call on dysfunctional eco-environmental peacebuilding models and the alternative approaches that might replace them, which shows the journal using its name as a programme — when a model fails, publish the alternatives. A fifth is environmental politics, where ecological change meets political practice, and a sixth is political theory proper, where the concepts of the field are themselves the subject.

Readers should also expect the journal's characteristic register. Alternatives has a long-standing openness to theoretically ambitious, interdisciplinary and even playful modes of argument — scholarship that draws on sociology, cultural studies and philosophy, and that treats forms such as humour and narrative as political material rather than decoration. That openness is not looseness: the journal's stated standards of theoretical rigour and empirical precision apply to unconventional work with the same force as to conventional work.

Special issues and the journal's agenda-setting role

Like many journals in its field, Alternatives uses special issues to concentrate argument on a theme, and its recent special issues are a useful guide to where its editors think the field's live questions are: Eastern Europe at war, the Gulf states in transition, and the failures of prevailing eco-environmental peacebuilding models. For prospective authors, special-issue calls are the journal's most explicit invitations, and they come with deadlines and guest-editor frameworks that differ from the ordinary submission route; for readers, the special issues are the fastest way to sample the journal's current preoccupations in a single sitting.

The journal also maintains the ordinary apparatus of a SAGE title in its field: articles published online ahead of print, browseable collections, most-read and most-cited lists drawn from citation data, and author blogs connected to published articles, which give authors a route to address a wider audience in plainer language.

Peer review publication ethics and costs

Alternatives is a peer-reviewed journal, and SAGE's description of what authors will enjoy puts rigorous peer review first. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and its submission guidelines direct authors to the international standards for authors maintained by that body and to SAGE's editorial and publication-ethics policies. Those memberships and policies matter in practice: they govern how the journal handles allegations of misconduct, conflicts of interest, authorship disputes and corrections, and they give authors a documented framework to point to if a process goes wrong.

On cost, the guidelines are welcome and explicit: there are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal. Open-access options are available for authors who need or wish to make their article openly accessible — for example because a funder requires it — under SAGE's open-access arrangements, which are separate from the ordinary subscription route and may carry a charge payable under those arrangements. Authors should read the current open-access terms on the journal's SAGE pages at the time of acceptance rather than assuming any figure from a secondary source.

SAGE also states a diversity and inclusion pledge in the journal's guidelines, committing to encourage submissions and peer review from a diverse range of authors and reviewers across countries and backgrounds. For a journal whose founding argument was about whose experience counts in world politics, that pledge is continuous with its editorial identity rather than an ornament on it.

Manuscript expectations

The journal's author guidance invites original manuscripts that fall within its aims and scope, submitted through its online submission site. Its review process draws on scholars in many different societies, and authors are therefore strongly encouraged to ensure that submissions are accessible to a broad cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and theoretically sophisticated audience. That sentence deserves to be taken literally by anyone preparing a manuscript: an article that assumes deep familiarity with one country's internal policy debate, or with one sub-field's private vocabulary, without building the bridge for outside readers, is working against the journal's stated test.

On length, the journal's instructions have traditionally placed articles in the region of eight to nine thousand words, while expressly allowing longer or shorter contributions where the content justifies them. Authors should confirm the current formatting and length requirements in the live submission guidelines before submitting, since publisher guidelines are revised and the version in force at submission is the one that governs. The traditional structure the guidelines describe — a title page with author names, affiliations and email addresses, followed by a page carrying the abstract, four or five keywords and short author biographies, with the article text beginning after — reflects a workflow in which identifying material is kept separate from the text sent for review.

Fit, for this journal, is best tested in three questions. First, does the manuscript actually engage the relation between global conditions and local practice, identity or polity — or could it be published unchanged in any general journal? Second, does it challenge or refine a prevailing assumption, rather than applying a standard framework to a new case without friction? Third, is it written to be read across cultures and disciplines, with its context built in and its concepts explained? A yes to all three is the journal's sweet spot; a manuscript that fails the first question is the most common kind of misfit, regardless of its quality.

Indexing and metrics

Alternatives is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and in the Social Sciences Citation Index, the long-established citation index for the social sciences within the Web of Science — the two indexing facts that matter most for most authors in its field, and the ones consistently reported for the journal. Its Scopus coverage runs from 1975, matching its founding. The JournalsWorld records for the journal list an h-index of 53, a figure consistent with five decades of continuous publication in a citing discipline.

Impact-factor figures for this journal vary by year and by source, and this profile therefore does not present any single number as the journal's current measure. SAGE's own advertising material for the journal and its submission-guideline documents have carried different figures in different years, as they must, since the underlying Journal Citation Reports value is recalculated annually. Authors who need the current figure — for a tenure file, a funder report or a departmental requirement — should take it from the current Journal Citation Reports or from SAGE's live journal page, with its year attached. What can be said stably, and what matters more for a submission decision, is the journal's position: a well-established, SSCI-indexed, Q2-range title in political science and international relations categories in recent SCImago listings, with a readership and citation record built over fifty years.

How readers use the journal

Alternatives rewards several reading strategies. Specialists in critical international relations read it as one of the field's agenda-setting venues, where arguments about globalisation, security and identity have often appeared early. Political scientists outside that tradition read it to test their assumptions against the strongest version of the challenge to them, which is precisely the service its founders intended. Graduate students read it — and are set it — because its articles model how to write theoretically engaged, empirically grounded work that speaks across regions. Policy-adjacent readers, especially in peacebuilding, development and environmental governance, read its special issues for concentrated, critical assessments of the models they work with.

Access is through the usual SAGE channels: institutional subscription for most readers, online-first articles ahead of the printed issue, and open-access versions of individual articles where authors have taken that route. Libraries catalogue the journal under both its short and full titles, which is another reason the ISSN pair — 0304-3754 for print, 2163-3150 for online — is the reliable retrieval key.

Cautions and honest limits

Three cautions belong in any honest profile of this journal. First, its breadth is real but its centre is critical and theoretical; authors of purely descriptive, technical or policy-evaluation work, however competent, should expect the fit question to be asked hard. Second, quarterly publication with special issues in the mix means ordinary submissions compete for a limited number of slots, and a rigorous review process at a fifty-year-old SSCI journal takes the time such processes take — authors on short clocks should plan accordingly. Third, the journal's name is a cataloguing trap: before citing anything, check the ISSN; before telling an institution you published in Alternatives, be ready to show that the Alternatives in question is the SAGE political-science journal and not one of its namesakes.

None of those cautions diminishes the journal's standing. A title that has published continuously since 1975, that retains its founding questions without being trapped by them, and that still sets out to find new forms of political practice and identity under global conditions, has earned its place in its field. This record, under the journal's full title, is the JournalsWorld home for that journal; its thin duplicate under the short title is flagged for merging in the report accompanying this profile.

A note on the journal and its namesakes

Because the word in this journal's title is so ordinary, libraries and databases have evolved careful habits around it, and readers benefit from adopting the same habits. Cite the journal with its ISSN whenever a system allows it. When a search under the short title returns results from health, education, energy or regional-studies periodicals with similar names, treat those results as belonging to different journals until an ISSN check proves otherwise. And when an older reference list gives a volume number that seems too high or too low for a 1975 quarterly, check the arithmetic: a genuine Alternatives article from, for example, the journal's fifth decade should sit in a volume range consistent with annual volume numbering across that span, and an inconsistency is usually the sign that a namesake journal, rather than this one, is the true source. These are small disciplines, but this journal, more than most, rewards them.

Frequently asked questions

What is the journal's full title? Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. It is commonly cited simply as Alternatives.

Who publishes it, and since when? SAGE Publications, since 1975, in association with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, India.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0304-3754 and online ISSN 2163-3150. Those two numbers distinguish it from every other periodical with a similar name.

How often does it appear? Quarterly.

Who edits it? The editor-in-chief listed by SAGE is Lacin Idil Oztig of Yıldız Technical University.

What does it cost to publish? There are no fees to submit or publish. Open-access publication is available as an option under SAGE's arrangements, on the terms current at acceptance.

Where is it indexed? In Scopus, with coverage from 1975, and in the Social Sciences Citation Index.

What kind of article fits best? A theoretically rigorous, empirically precise article of roughly eight to nine thousand words that engages contemporary political problems through the relation between global conditions and local practice and identity, written for a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary audience.

Summary

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political (ISSN 0304-3754; e-ISSN 2163-3150) is SAGE's quarterly journal of critical political science and international relations, founded in 1975 amid Cold War dangers and early arguments about globalisation, and still organised around the question of what new forms of political practice and identity global conditions make possible. Published in association with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index, free to submit to and rigorous in review, it remains one of the defining venues of its tradition. Researchers whose work connects the global and the local with theoretical ambition will find in it both an audience and an argument worth joining.