Editorial

It was as early as 1990, following the first months of “Year 1” after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, when a small group of colleagues from the generation of our university teachers, tutor, supervisors, and active public intellectuals, have decided to launch this journal, for which they have found the title Human Affairs. Their basic intention was to enable a look beyond the torn-down iron curtain in order to let the world to see what kind of research has been produced in the post-Soviet Slovak academic millieu after the survival of 40 years of totalitarian regime. Key works of Slovak academics working in the fields of humanities and social sciences started to be presented to the international readership in English translations. This was quite a bold aspiration especially when it comes to those fields that were systematically damaged by in the ideological crust during the former 40 years. With this end in view, the very 1st issue was published the same year and the whole project took off the ground under the chief editorship of Dr. Viktor Krupa, one of the leading Slovak linguists, working in the area of oriental languages and cultures. Thanks to him and his collaborators at the Institute of Oriental Studies and some other institutes at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the journal has served this mission for more than a decade, being published and distributed abroad by domestic agencies (2 issues per a year). Nonetheless, with the time passing during which Slovak scholars have managed to integrate their intellectual production into the global mainstream research and publishing standards, it became clear that the original strategy to provide the sort of a showcase of best works of Slovak scholars in English for international scientific reception has lost its purpose, which called for a substantial revision of journal strategy.

The Institute for Research in Social Communication of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (then the Department of Social and Biological Communication, established also in 1990) was involved into the project of Human Affairs from its inception. Thus the due transition was initiated in 2002 when the Institute became the editorial office of the journal. However, it was clear that the challenge ahead is to find a new and unique strategy and editorial policy so as to enable the journal is to survive and flourish. Those involved in the journal agreed to make it a standard part of the international market of academic journals in humanities and social sciences as well as to bring an attractive new platform for knowledge. For the sake of this goal, we had to implement several substantial changes, such as not relying solely on domestic authors anymore and opening up the space for international authorship; to expand the editorial and advisory boards of international scholars; and, last but not least, to start publish relevant and attractive contributions to the humanities and social sciences focused on topical “hot” issues in these fields. To accomplish this, we made two strategic decisions: 1) to give up disciplinarity in favour of postdisciplinarity, in other words to focus on the current relevant issues and problems and their study based on any possibel integral epistemology rather than building the “monuments” for some particular scientific discipline; ^[1] and 2) to publish monothematic “symposia” on selected issues. ^[2] Another change was to expand the standard number of issues from 2 to standard 4 annually. Needless to say, such a policy had shown itself even a bolder than the original one pursued by the founders of the journal.

After the hard work of the last decade, the first results of change have become visible. With the collaboration of partners such as CEEOL and Versita we entered the electronic publishing arena, and finally the publication of the journal had been taken over by Springer in 2011, and by de Gruyter since 2015. The journal has reached its position on the global academic market, which can surely be considered a unique achievement among the journals coming from the post-Soviet countries. Currently the journal has contributors from all over the globe, and is being indexed/abstracted by The Philosopher’s Index, Sociological Abstracts, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. What is more important for current academic trends, it is being covered by EBSCO (relevant databases), EBSCO Discovery Service, ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences), Google Scholar, SCImago (SJR), SCOPUS, and, last but not least, by the Web of Science within the Emerging Sources Citation Index (part of Core Collection), among others. According to SJR it is ranked in Q2 as of 2018. ^[3]

As of 2018, the next phase in the development of the journal has started when new partners have joined our editorial offices and boards: The Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague represented by the Centre of Global Studies, and the University of Keele, UK, represented by Philosophy Department of the School of Social, Political and Global Studies. The first results of this collaboration may be already seen in the issues of the volume 28/2018. By its thematic issues, the Centre of Global Studies has contributed macro-regional and global perspectives on the contemporary important topics: it has offered the African perspective last year, the Latin American one this year, and the Chinese one next year, for example. Therefore, the journal has become more transnational, intercultural and global.

Approaching our 30th anniversary volume in 2020, I would like to thank all our collaborators and partners who have contributed to the success of the journal up to date. These include the members of our boards, special issues editors, reviewers, technical editors, native English editors and webmasters. Special thanks go to our partners at Versita, Springer and de Gruyter companies. There are good reasons and great hopes that the journal will advance to a higher level on the international ranks in the near future. Its highest quality is our priority.

Last but not least, on the occasion of this 30th anniversary, we would like to make the following announcement:

The Call for Papers for the Award Essay on the topic of “The Future of Humanity” (see below).

January 2020

Editors