Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia

About Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia

Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia — Journal Profile

Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia — styled REGION by its editors — is a peer-reviewed international journal devoted to the history and the present-day political, economic, social and cultural affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc. It is published by Slavica Publishers in the United States on behalf of the Institute of Russian Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea, an arrangement that already says much about the journal: an American specialist publisher, a Korean research institute, and a subject region stretching from Central Europe to Central Asia. It carries ISSN 2165-0659 in print and ISSN 2166-4307 online, and it has published since 2012. This profile is anchored to those ISSNs, to the journal's own presentation on the Institute of Russian Studies site, to its Project MUSE presence, and to bibliometric records fetched directly for this profile. Figures are attributed to their sources throughout, and fields that the sources in hand do not settle are stated as unverified rather than guessed.

The journal arrived at a charged moment. Its first issue, Volume 1, Number 1, appeared in 2012, two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet state had created fifteen successor countries and set the former satellites of Eastern Europe on divergent paths. The founding wager, restated in the journal's current aims, is that transformation in this vast space is best understood at the local and national levels, and in the changing character of the region's relationships with the rest of the world — a perspective its editors frame through glocalization, the interplay of global pressures and local adaptation. Subsequent history, including war, energy politics, migration and renewed authoritarian consolidation across parts of the region, has made that wager more consequential, and the journal's pages are one of the places where the scholarly argument about it is carried on in English, for an international readership.

At a Glance

A record-keeping note belongs here. The JournalsWorld record from which this profile began stored the publisher as a bare numeric code, 5625, and the country as the United States. The country is defensible — Slavica is the publisher of record and is American — but it is incomplete as a description of the journal, whose commissioning institute, one of its two editors-in-chief and its managing editors are Korean. Directories that copy the numeric code as if it were a publisher name are propagating a database artefact. The publisher is Slavica Publishers; the sponsoring institute is the Institute of Russian Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Both facts are stated on the institute's own page for the journal.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The journal's stated aims, on the Institute of Russian Studies page, are to explore the history and the current political, economic, social and cultural affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc; to focus in particular on facets of transformation at the local and national levels in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia; and to examine the changing character of those regions' relationships with the rest of the world in the context of glocalization. The Project MUSE formulation of the same mission adds the study of the regions' history to the present-day brief and uses the wording of the journal's founding period, framing outside relationships in the context of globalization and stressing local adaptation to global phenomena and that adaptation's transnational significance. The two formulations are consistent; together they define a journal that is simultaneously a history journal and a contemporary area-studies journal, and that expects its historical work to speak to transformation and its contemporary work to be historically literate.

In practice, that scope supports several distinct kinds of contribution. Political scientists write on parties, elections, state building and foreign relations across the post-Soviet space. Economists write on transition, markets, energy and regional development. Historians write on the Russian Empire, the Soviet period and the memory politics that connect both to the present. Sociologists and anthropologists write on social change, identity, migration and everyday life under transformation. Cultural and literary scholars write on film, literature, folklore and media. The editorial board's composition, discussed below, maps almost exactly onto that list, which is a useful test for authors: if your manuscript's discipline is represented on the board, the journal almost certainly has the competence to judge it; the board includes historians in the largest number, followed by political scientists, literary and film scholars, economists, sociologists and anthropologists. The journal also publishes book reviews, and its submission guidance invites them explicitly alongside articles.

The regional boundary deserves a sentence of care. The journal's region is the former Soviet bloc, glossed in its title as Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Work on the Caucasus, on the Baltic states, on Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, and on the Central Asian republics sits squarely inside that gloss, as does work on the East European states that were aligned with, but never part of, the Soviet state itself. Work on Western Europe or on global politics without a substantial post-Soviet core does not become in-scope merely because it mentions the region; the transformation of this specific space, and its relations with the outside world, is the journal's organising question.

Editorial Board and Governance

The editors-in-chief named on the institute page are Lewis Siegelbaum, a historian of Russia at Michigan State University, and Sang Yong Pyo, a linguist at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. The managing editors are Joonseo Song, a historian, and Seungdo Ra, a scholar of culture, both at Hankuk. The wider editorial board is strikingly international and senior. It includes, among others, Evgeny Avdokushin (economics, Moscow State University); Edith Clowes (literature, University of Virginia); Evgeny Dobrenko (literature and film, University of Sheffield); Adrienne Edgar (history, University of California, Santa Barbara); Grigorii Golosov (politics, European University at St. Petersburg); Helena Goscilo (literature and film, Ohio State University); Guan Guihai (politics, Peking University); Nargis Kassenova (politics, KIMEP University, Kazakhstan); Daniela Koleva (philosophy, Sofia University); Natalie Kononenko (folklore, University of Alberta); Ivan Kurilla (politics, European University at St. Petersburg); László Kürti (anthropology, University of Miskolc); Stephen Lovell (history, King's College London); Donald Raleigh (history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Richard Sakwa (politics, University of Kent); Oscar Sanchez-Sibony (University of Hong Kong); Elena Shadrina (economics, Waseda University); Vlad Strukov (culture and film, University of Leeds); Rimma Tangalycheva (sociology, St. Petersburg State University); Zhan Toshchenko (sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences); Ilya Vinitsky (literature, Princeton University); Andrew Wachtel (literature, Narxoz University, Kazakhstan); and Krzysztof Zamorski (history, Jagiellonian University).

Governance of that kind has consequences a profile should state plainly. Decisions rest with scholars who are themselves leading producers in the field, spread across the region's own universities and the major Western centres for its study. That raises the bar for source handling — archival claims, Russian-language and regional-language scholarship, and statistical series from the region will be read by people who know them — and it lowers the risk that a competent regional manuscript fails for want of a qualified reader. It also means the board's published affiliations are a snapshot: affiliations of scholars working on and in this region have shifted considerably in recent years, and authors should treat the institute page as the journal's current statement while expecting individual affiliations to change between printings.

Peer Review and How to Submit

The institute page describes the review process in a short paragraph that is worth following exactly. All submitted articles go through a peer review process after initial screening by internal editors. Each article that passes screening is read by a minimum of two anonymous external referees. The journal therefore operates a screened, anonymised external review model: the editors act as a genuine first filter, and authors should expect a desk decision where a manuscript is out of scope, under-prepared, or not yet at the standard the board will defend. Anonymity runs at least in the direction stated — referees are anonymous — and authors should prepare manuscripts accordingly, removing self-identifying material from the text and notes until the editorial office instructs otherwise.

Submissions, including book reviews, are directed to the managing editor, Dr Joonseo Song, at the submission address published on the institute page (region.articles@hufs.ac.kr, as printed there). That e-mail route, rather than a commercial manuscript platform, is the journal's stated channel, so authors should keep their covering message complete and professional: title, abstract, word count, a statement that the work is original and not under consideration elsewhere, and full contact and affiliation details. Details that the institute page does not publish — a fixed article length, a house citation style sheet, turnaround times, and any author charges — are not publicly disclosed on that page, and this profile therefore does not invent them. Authors who need them should request the journal's current author guidelines from the managing editor before formatting a submission, and should confirm the position on charges in the same enquiry, since no fee statement appears in the sources in hand.

Metrics, Indexing and Their Limits

Fetched directly for this profile, the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 2165-0659 (source S4210218659) reports 271 works, 569 citations, an h-index of 11, an i10-index of 15 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.33, with coverage from 2012 to 2025 — the journal's full life to date, which makes this record unusually complete beside the partial records many humanities titles receive. The same figures were returned by a direct fetch of that source ID, so the readings are at least internally stable at the time of checking. Its leading OpenAlex topics — Soviet and Russian history; post-Soviet geopolitical dynamics; sociopolitical dynamics in Russia; Eastern European communism and reforms — describe the journal's centre of gravity accurately.

Secondary SCImago summaries in hand report a lower h-index, 10, which is the figure the JournalsWorld stored record also carried, together with SJR values of 0.115 for 2024 and 0.132 for 2025 in one aggregator's annual table, and subject standings of History in the third quartile with Economics and Econometrics and Sociology and Political Science in the fourth quartile. A two-point message follows. First, the h-index difference between 10 and 11 is a database difference — Scopus-based counting in SCImago against OpenAlex's wider corpus — not an error to be resolved by picking the larger number; cite the source with the figure. Second, the journal's citation profile is that of a specialist area-studies title: respected inside its field, cited steadily rather than heavily, and ill-served by any attempt to rank it against general social-science journals on raw citation volume. Its real standing is better judged by its board, its MUSE distribution, its unbroken run since 2012, and the company its articles keep. On open-access indexing, DOAJ queries on both ISSNs returned no record, consistent with a subscription-and-library distribution model through MUSE and Slavica rather than an open-access one; readers without institutional access should expect paywall boundaries and should not mistake that model for a quality signal in either direction.

Fit: Who This Journal Suits

Region suits scholars whose work explains change in the post-Soviet world with evidence: area specialists in history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology and culture; comparativists who use the region's cases to test wider claims about transition, authoritarianism, nationalism or integration, provided the regional evidence carries the argument; and scholars based in the region itself who want an English-language, internationally boarded venue that will read regional-language scholarship seriously. It is a weaker fit for purely theoretical work without regional material, for policy commentary without scholarly apparatus, and for single-country descriptive reports that do not engage the journal's transformation question. Doctoral researchers should note the two-referee external standard and the seniority of the board: the journal is a credible target, but not a soft one, and a manuscript that has not yet been workshopped will usually be found out at screening or in review.

Taken on the evidence, Region is a durable specialist journal with a clear question, a genuinely international editorial community, a documented review process and a complete publication run since 2012 across a period in which its subject region has rarely left the centre of world politics. Its metrics are modest, as its field's metrics usually are, and its public author information is thinner than best practice would wish — length, style and fee details require a direct enquiry. Neither point diminishes the central fact: for research on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia in transformation, this is one of the field's established English-language addresses.

Region in Its Field, and How to Verify It

Authors choosing between area-studies venues should place Region deliberately. The field's older flagships, such as Slavic Review and Europe-Asia Studies, draw very broad submissions across Slavic and Eurasian studies and carry correspondingly broad readerships. Region's proposition is narrower and, for the right manuscript, stronger: a journal whose organising question is transformation in the former Soviet bloc, whose sponsoring institute sits in Korea rather than in North America or Western Europe, and whose board deliberately mixes scholars based inside the region with scholars based outside it. A study of a Central Asian city's adaptation to new trade routes, of memory politics in a Baltic capital, of energy dependence in an East European state, or of local government reform in a Russian province is not peripheral material here, squeezed in beside a dominant subfield; it is the journal's central material. Conversely, a manuscript in Slavic literary studies with no transformation dimension, or in Russian linguistics as such, belongs more naturally in the language-and-literature titles of the field, even though individual board members hold literary expertise. Fit, for this journal, is a question about the argument a manuscript makes, not only about the map it covers.

Verification, for readers and evaluators, follows the ISSNs. The genuine journal is the Slavica title with print ISSN 2165-0659 and electronic ISSN 2166-4307, published on behalf of the Institute of Russian Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, carried by Project MUSE from Volume 1, Number 1 in 2012, and described on the institute's own site with the board and review process summarised in this profile. It should not be confused with similarly named titles: Regional Studies is a different, British-based journal in regional science; Regional Research of Russia is a different, Pleiades-published title; and the phrase regional studies names a whole field as well as this journal. A citation, a directory entry or an indexing claim that does not resolve to those ISSNs and that publisher-institute pairing is about some other publication, and metrics borrowed from those namesakes — which include much larger citation figures — must not be credited to Region. That single discipline, checking the ISSN pair before crediting any number, prevents the commonest errors made about this journal.

Sources and Verification Notes

Principal sources: the Institute of Russian Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies page for REGION (aims and scope, Slavica publication on the institute's behalf, peer-review description, editors-in-chief, managing editors, full board list, submission address, ISSN 2166-4307 as printed there); Project MUSE for the journal's description and its Volume 1, Number 1 (2012) first issue; the OpenAlex source record S4210218659 fetched via the ISSN endpoint and re-fetched directly by source ID with identical headline figures (271 works, 569 citations, h-index 11); DOAJ search-API queries on 2165-0659 and 2166-4307 (no results); and attributed secondary SCImago summaries (h-index 10; SJR 0.115 for 2024 and 0.132 for 2025; History Q3, Economics and Sociology/Political Science Q4). Conflicts flagged: the JournalsWorld stored publisher code 5625 against the named publisher Slavica; its single-country label against the journal's Korean institute base; and the SCImago h-index 10 against the OpenAlex h-index 11. Article length limits, citation style, review turnaround and author charges are not publicly disclosed on the institute page in hand.