To submit your dispatch, please select Research Note when you get to that stage in the ScholarOne portal.

Around the world and in various guises, authoritarianism is on the rise. In confluence with emboldened waves of misogyny, misinformation, anti-intellectualism, discrimination, reactionism, and tribalism, these movements have succeeded in undermining media and academies as sites of knowledge production and accountability, and rolled back hard-won gains for civil rights. 

Variously labelled as a time of the oligarchs, of democratic decline (e.g. Krastev 2018), neofeudalism (Dean 2025), tyranny (Snyder 2017), a third wave of autocratization (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019), or aspirational fascism (Connolly 2017; Sakurai 2022), this moment has raised doubts about the very future of democracy. 

To inaugurate our first year with Cambridge University Press, Democratic Theory - open access and online first - are inviting stand-alone research notes, called ‘dispatches from the field,’ that offer diagnoses, reflections, normative or strategic implications, or predictions regarding democracy in the context of rising authoritarianisms around the world. These can be anywhere from 3,500-8,000 words excluding references, and undergo the same blind peer-review process as a standard research article.

Among the questions this invitation might prompt for you as a democratic scholar, we are particularly interested in contributions that offer insight regarding:

• In what ways can established, emerging, or potential discourses and practices of democracy help to make sense of our quickly shifting context? in what ways are they inadequate to the task?
• How and why have norms and discourses of democracy lost their popular appeal, or changed or co-opted over this period? 
• What factors or features of this political moment have been undertheorised or misunderstood to date?
• What is unprecedented about this political moment, and what are its continuities across time and place?
• With democratic language in some instances fuelling right wing dynamics and rhetoric, how might they need to be revised?
• What fugitive sites and visionary paths for democracy persist alongside these authoritarian movements, and with what implications for thought and practice? 
• What are emerging as strategic or normative insights for countermovements and democratic institutions? 

More generally, we invite ‘dispatches from the field’ – specific to your specializations as well as geographic and political context – that offer observations and reflections on these developments as they are unfolding in real time. Authors are encouraged to identify what is unique to their context, or selected view, and what may change in our descriptions of authoritarian, fascist, and anti-democratic or pro-oligarchic politics, as well as our responses to them. 

We are especially interested to publish dispatches that reflect the diversity and reach of this political moment across each continent and major global region, from leading democratic scholars to scholars who have never submitted to the journal before or who may not be a democratic theorist but think deeply about democracy. Democratic Theory is a home for democratic scholarship, broadly conceived.

While longer submissions are welcome, we also invite shorter contributions than standard research notes to facilitate illuminating what is happening on the ground now. 

Dispatches will be read, reviewed, and published online first on a rolling basis. Published papers will be collated at the end of the year into Democratic Theory’s fourth issue in 2026 under the section heading “Dispatches from the Field”. Comments of a shorter, and more conversational, nature will also be considered for the journal’s substack.

We intend to maintain this style of research note, and thematic focus, for the foreseeable future.

Questions?

Please send your queries to jean-paul.gagnon@canberra.edu.au (managing editor).