Buy Print
Magazine

Buy Print
Magazine

The Texas National Security Review is committed to excellence, scholarly rigor, and big ideas.

We aim for articles published in this journal to end up on university syllabi and policy desks from Washington to Tokyo, and to be cited as the foundational research and analysis on world affairs.

The Texas National Security Review publishes three kinds of articles.

  1. Academic manuscripts for “The Scholar” section.
  2. Policy and practitioner articles for “The Strategist” section.
  3. Roundtables either on books or specific issues.

Each of these require different standards, guidance, and considerations.

The Scholar

Our scholarly submissions are published in our quarterly print edition and online.

We do not publish punditry, “inside baseball,” or small ball. We are open to all disciplinary approaches — including but not limited to history, political science, economics, the law, science, engineering, ethics and philosophy, and sociology — and diverse methodological approaches. We are especially eager to publish works that connect and transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. The focus of our first several issues is world order and its constituent parts: grand strategy, great power competition, internal wars, homeland defense, non-state actors, international trade and legal regimes, and prosperity and decline.

While we are catholic when it comes to discipline and methodology, we are not interested in arcane arguments that are only of interest to the high priests of the established disciplines. If your arguments and methods are not accessible to the policymaker, they do not belong in this journal.

Our editorial team, editorial board, associate editors, and outside reviewers vet submissions in the most rigorous and useful way possible. Our review and editorial processes are oriented towards generating the most cutting edge, impactful scholarship on national and international security. We embrace and build upon the best practices of scholarly review, while striving to avoid what we all know as the pathologies that plague the academic review process.

The journal exercises the right to perform a desk rejection instead of taking a manuscript forward for peer review. We also may ask you to make revisions to set your manuscript up for success before a peer review. If our editorial team chooses to proceed to peer review, then we follow a double-blind peer review process with at least two reviewers. Based on the peer review, we may reject, recommend revisions and resubmission, or accept.

If you are interested in submitting an academic manuscript for this section of the journal, please follow these steps:

  1. Send your manuscript as a Word document (no other formats are accepted) with a cover letter and a 100-word summary to editorial@tnsr.org, with subject line “Scholar Submission.”
  2. Ensure your manuscript does not have your name on it or any references that would enable a reviewer to identify who you are.
  3. We are open-minded about word-length but demand precision, accessibility, and concision while understanding that some arguments require length to unfold. We recommend a length somewhere between 8,000 and 17,000 words, not including footnotes.
  4. We use AP style for text (with some exceptions) and the Chicago Manual of Style for footnotes. Please read our footnote guidelines and apply them to your citations before submitting.
  5. Those employing quantitative methods must use readable and well-labeled graphs and charts (as opposed to in-text formulae and regression tables).
  6. Let us know at the time that you submit your article whether it will need to go through an internal review process before you are cleared for publication.

Please feel free to email editorial@tnsr.org if you’d like to ask if your article might be the right fit for the Texas National Security Review. However, in making these inquiries, please do not attach the draft of the article.

The Strategist

These articles are also published in our quarterly print edition and online.

Strategist articles conform to the stylistic requirements for our scholarly articles, but are written from the perspective of those who formulate or implement policy. An ideal Strategist author has significant policymaking experience or experience — military or civilian, U.S. or international — implementing policy that is specifically relevant to the issue on which they are writing. Often this may be at a senior level, but mid-level authors also bring an important perspective. Because the articles reflect, at least in part, the authors’ personal experience, they may be less-densely footnoted than scholarly articles, but should still footnote where appropriate (see our footnote guidelines). Regardless of the level at which the author has worked, it is important that their experience is such that it is clear to the reader why this author’s perspective should be given special weight. A smaller segment of Strategist authors are those whose perspective is of interest to those who follow policy on a particular issue by virtue of the position they hold or have held in the past. Often these Strategist contributors hold or have recently held a Senate-confirmed position relevant to national security policy, or they serve in Congress on a relevant committee.

Strategist articles typically range from 3,000 to 8,000 words in length, although we entertain longer submissions if the content justifies the length. Strategist articles are single-blind reviewed.

Roundtables

Roundtables are where we get to hear from multiple experts on either a subject matter or a recently published book. These collections of essays are solicited by the Texas National Security Review. However, if you have an idea for a future roundtable discussion, either a topic or a book, or would like to be considered as a potential roundtable contributor in the future, please feel free to email us at editorial@tnsr.org.

Ethics Policy

The Texas National Security Review expects all authors to comply with the ethical obligations outlined in APSA’s A Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science (2012) and Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research (2020).

For studies that constitute human subjects research (i.e., involve living individuals from whom data was obtained by intervention or interaction or about whom identifiable private information was collected), the submitting author must:

  • declare whether the research received IRB (or equivalent institutional body) approval or exemption.
  • discuss in the text or an appendix the ethics of the human subjects research, including consent, deception, confidentiality, potential harm, and compensation.

Authors whose institutions do not have an IRB (or equivalent institutional body) should:

  • in an appendix intended for circulation to reviewers, indicate the absence of such an institutional body and describe in detail their research practices with respect to human subjects.
  • provide the editorial team at the Texas National Security Review with official documentation substantiating the absence of such an institutional body at the time of submission.

Upon conditional acceptance for publication in the Texas National Security Review, authors of studies involving human subjects must upload evidence of IRB (or equivalent institutional body) approval or exemption (unless otherwise indicated by the editorial staff) and other relevant documentation, such as survey instruments or interview guides.

 

Get in touch