Call for papers for the volume 10, issue 1, year 2025
In order to encourage academic production in the field of State Sciences, the Editorial Board of Revista de Ciências do Estado (REVICE) hereby announces the call for papers for the dossier of volume 10, issue 1, year 2025. The theme of this issue's dossier will be "AFTER ALL, WHAT IS THE STATE?".
The State, like everything in human reality, has a history. If we take into account the Western tradition, it is the fruit and result of the tensions and conflicts of a people in relation to its time and its territory. As a historical and cultural manifestation, it is possible to conceive the seed of the oak tree since the Greeks, with their classical forms of monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, and, so dear to us, democracy. However, its lexical inauguration is more recent, between republics and principalities, as classified by Machiavelli, the State is the subject and the object of a struggle that remains latent to this day: the dispute between Power and Liberty. Perhaps the Rechsstaat is, finally, the reconciliation between these two conflicting poles, when Power is placed at the service of Liberty. In this interpretation of the history of the State, it is both a project and a destiny. Something to be fought for, conquered, and continuously perfected as each people and its culture advance.
If in this vision the content of the State would be in Liberty and in the incessant struggles to make it concrete and effective, other visions and interpretations are possible. The State can also be read from the perspective of power as violence. It would be an instrument whose armed arm would be at the service of a certain elite and that would not correspond to the totality, in a reality divided between classes. In the search for Equality, the question arises whether the State is merely a means to be abandoned later, or simply something to be discarded once and for all. There are still those who think of the State merely as the organizer of the productive forces, that is, of labor. An instrument of disciplinary, colonizing power. Perspectives are like images in a kaleidoscope, each point of view is an entire universe of new images and new meanings. This dossier, therefore, aims to be this space of dispute, a field of debate of a reality so present, but at the same time so contradictory. It is the eternal human problem of conceiving the ideal political organization. In view of this, we ask ourselves:
What legitimizes the State? What is its origin? Is the State the means or the end of Liberty? Or both? Is there a transformative or conservative potential in the State? Is it a guarantor or an inhibitor of effective Liberty? Is there Liberty outside the State? Is there a single, universal model of State to be adopted by all? Or would it be the image and likeness of its people and its culture? How does each civilization face it and use it? A project to be pursued? Or to be left aside? What are its limits and potentialities? What is its history and its destiny in Brazil and in the world? What is its relationship with politics, with Academia, and with democracy? How to break with past paradigms and establish a new way of thinking about what the State is? What were the historical trajectories of the construction of thought and thinking about the State? What are the errors and successes of the tradition of thinking about the State? For whom or for what does it serve? What is its future?
After all, what is the State?
The answer and the dispute over its meaning remain open. In this issue, the Revista de Ciências do Estado calls for debate on what seems to us to be the most intriguing collective work in history, especially when linking an infinity of themes dear to the understanding of humanity: Culture, History, Philosophy, Law, Constitutionalism, Politics, Geopolitics, Strategy, Civilization, Barbarism, Power, Violence, Liberty...
Therefore, this issue includes works on: State, Sovereignty, People, Territory, Politics, Power, Forms of State, Systems of Government, Comparative Theory of the State, Social Order, Democratic Rechsstaat, Hegemony, Governance, State Philosophy, History of the State, History of the Rechsstaat, Separation of Powers, Dictatorship, Authoritarianism, Power Dynamics, Fundamental Rights, Legitimacy, Constitutionalism, Culture, State Culture, Civilization, State Bureaucracy, Contractualism, Cosmopolitanism, Neoliberalism, National Defense, Failed States, State Utopias, Democracy.
I - The publication of REVICE will take place in a continuous flow.
II – REVICE will receive papers for the present dossier from the date of its publication until April 18th, 2025.
III - Papers whose evaluation and correction process is not completed by June 30th, 2025 will be published in the following issues of REVICE.
IV - All REVICE's submission policies, as well as its editorial policies, can be found on its official website.
V – Only articles, essays, reviews, unpublished translations and historical memoirs will be accepted.
VI – Papers with free themes continue to be accepted by REVICE.
Belo Horizonte, January 16th, 2025.
Theo Augusto Apolinário Moreira Fonseca
Editor-in-Chief of REVICE
Lucas Antônio Nogueira Rodrigues
Deputy Editor-in-Chief of REVICE
