Aims & Scope

International Political Anthropology is an international peer-reviewed journal. It aims to provide a forum for interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship, addressing problems and concerns of the contemporary political world through the prism of anthropologically-based approaches. It gives voice to conceptual and methodological creativity, linking the study of politics to perspectives and tools drawn from disciplines, subject areas, and modes of enquiry that were long considered irrelevant to the study of politics proper.  

International Political Anthropology recognises that institutional accounts of politics within the frame of the state and in the relations between states have exhausted their capability to provide meaningful accounts of contemporary events, such as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, the crisis of the nation state, the proliferation of new forms of violence and war, the resurgence of religion as a political force, or the acute and seemingly worldwide crisis of political leadership, all relating to the ongoing globalisation processes. While the contemporary study of politics is predominantly contained within the temporal and mental horizon of the Enlightenment, assuming that modernity can be studied on its own terms, this journal wishes to approach contemporary problems with a genuine sense of expanding horizons to both non-western and pre-modern, even ancient, political societies. It aims to root the understanding of contemporary problems in a range of traditions and streams of thought that encompass antiquity, Renaissance, early modernity, and theoretical attempts in the course of the 20th century that worked towards bringing these threads together. Recognising that many of the greatest figures of political thought lived through periods of crisis or dissolution of order, this journal thus opens up possibilities for experiential as opposed to ‘scholastic’ type of theory building, where experience shapes political consciousness, interpretative judgements, and meaning-formation.
 
International Political Anthropology invites contributions that link contemporary problems of politics to the comparative analysis of civilisations, mythology, archaeology, history of the longue durée, religion, symbolism, violence, or political spirituality. We also encourage contributions that thematise the pre-political links between human beings and authority in themes such as gift-giving, trust, beauty, truth, and truth-telling. We are similarly interested in submissions that connect analysis of historical crises with the interpretation of meaning as a central aspect of the formation of leaders, political consciousness, or social cohesion.

International Political Anthropology journal is indexed by Scopus since 2024.