Letter from the Editor
Dear readers,
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joseph Forcherio, and effective today, May 1, 2020, I am excited to begin serving as the editor-in-chief of the web edition of the International Affairs Review. I served as an editor during the 2019-2020 academic year, editing and learning from articles whose topics ranged from United States’ countering violent extremism policy to mental healthcare recommendations for UN peacekeepers. I want to thank the outgoing editor-in-chief, Mitchell Silva-Dennis, for his dedication to the publication and his leadership over the past year. He has diligently worked to make IAR a better forum for graduate student discourse on international relations.
I want to inform you of some initiatives that the editorial team and I plan to implement to make IAR Web an even better source of international affairs analysis. I recognize that the website is in many instances a hinderer rather than facilitator to reading our content. Links are broken, the search function is suboptimal, and uniformity in presentation is scarce. Over the next few months, we will be overhauling the website to make the user experience better. The website should not get in the way of your reading—it should enhance it.
To increase the diversity of thought among our articles, we will be reaching out to organizations with interests in graduate students to recruit staff writers and contributing writers from places external to The George Washington University and the Washington, D.C. area. Though GWU is our home, we endeavor to make IAR Web the premier online platform for graduate students to add to international policy discussions. Holding as wide a call for staff writer applications as possible will make sure that we better represent the array of thought on global affairs; routinely soliciting contributions from students from around the world will ensure we regularly publish opinions found outside the Beltway.
In addition to these two large projects, we want to improve your experience as a reader in several other ways. We are seeking to increase the number of articles we publish by mounting a sustained awareness campaign of both IAR Web’s contributions to international policy discourse as well as the publication opportunity we offer. We will be launching an Instagram—complementing our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles—to make knowing when we publish new articles even easier. We will improve quality control by making sure all articles adhere closely to our style guide and include the policy recommendations that make our publication unique.
Finally, thank you for supporting IAR Web. A publication is nothing without its readers. The editorial team and I are committed to making this the premier source for discussion on international relations written by graduate students. If you have comments or suggestions, please email iarweb@gwu.edu. We want to ensure we continuously earn your readership.
Sincerely,
Joseph Forcherio, Editor-in-Chief
International Affairs Review - Web Edition
