India Quarterly
A Journal of International AffairsIndia Quarterly (IQ) is the flagship publication of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), New Delhi and publishes in collaboration with M/s SAGE Publications, New Delhi (since January 2009).
India Quarterly is a refereed journal of international affairs. It was originally launched in 1945; its focus was on India and Asia. India has changed since then as has the texture of global politics and the journal now accepts papers on themes in global and regional politics that are likely to impact India’s interests.
The aim of the Journal is to encourage scholars,analysts and policy makers from India and abroad to contribute original articles on matters concerning international relations and national foreign policies.
The Journal promotes critical and objective analysis on any theme of importance relating to foreign policy and international affairs. Its purview includes regional and global concerns such as environmental issues, energy security, the international ramifications of identity-centric conflicts, cross-border movements of people and related concerns of human trafficking, illegal weapons transfers, terrorism human security, and global and regional political economy.
The opinions expressed in the India Quarterly are those of the authors and need not necessarily be in conformity with the views of the ICWA.
India Quarterly is indexed in ‘International Political Science Abstracts’ and ‘ABC of Political Science’ and Scopus. The copyright and all rights of reproduction and translation of material published in India Quarterly are reserved by the Council. Application for permission to translate or reproduce any material contained in them should be made to the Editor, India Quarterly.
Manuscripts and all editorial correspondence should be addressed to: The Editor, India Quarterly, at Indian Council of World Affairs, Sapru House, 01, Barakhambha Road, New Delhi 110 001. Manuscripts should be submitted via email only to editorindiaquarterly@gmail.com
Please refer to our Guidelines for Contributors to India Quarterly before submission of your manuscript.
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
India Quarterly is a peer reviewed journal of international affairs. When launched in 1945, its focus was primarily on India and Asia. However, as India’s interests have expanded so too has the mandate of the journal to include submissions on varied themes that are likely to impact India’s regional and global interests.
As the flagship publication of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), the India Quarterly encourages scholars, analysts and policy makers to contribute original articles on matters concerning international relations, national foreign policies and diplomatic history. It promotes objective analysis on themes of critical importance for an understanding of international affairs. Conceptually sound, empirically grounded and policy-oriented articles are particularly encouraged. Its purview includes regional and global concerns such as environmental issues, energy security, the international ramifications of identity-centric conflicts, cross-border movements of people and related concerns of human trafficking, illegal weapons transfers, terrorism human security global and regional political economy and diplomatic history.
The opinions expressed in the India Quarterly are those of the authors and may need not necessarily be in conformity with the outlook of the ICWA.
| Vijay Thakur Singh | Director-General, Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), New Delhi |
| Madhu Bhalla | Former Head and Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India |
| Tshering Chonzom Bhutia | Foreign Policy and Security Analyst |
| Rukmani Gupta | Defence and Security Analyst |
| G Balachandran | Consulting Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, India |
| Deepak Bhojwani | Former Ambassador, Government of India, India |
| Aparajita Biswas | Professor, Bombay University, Mumbai, India |
| Sanjay Chaturvedi | Professor, South Asian University, New Delhi |
| Nandan Unnikrishnan | Vice- President, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, India |
| Ibrahim Awad | Professor, American University, Cairo, Egypt |
| Kanti Bajpai | Professor and Director, Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore |
| Gopalan Balachandran | Professor, International History and Politics, The Graduate Institute, Geneva |
| Rajen Harshe | President, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, India |
| Indivar Kamtekar | Professor,Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi |
| Gilbert Khadiagala | Professor, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg |
| Fyodor Lukyanov | Professor, Research Director, Faculty of World Economy and International Affair, National Research University, Moscow, Russia |
| Lalit Mansingh | Former Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, India |
| Amitabh Mattoo | Professor, School of International Relations, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India |
| Dirk Messner | Professor, United Nations University, Bonn |
| C Raja Mohan | Professor and Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore |
| Chris Ogden | Associate Professor, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom |
| K Raghunath | Former Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, India |
| Dhruv Raina | Professor, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi |
| Rajesh Rajagopalan | Professor, Centre for International Politics and Diplomacy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi |
| Yan Xuetong | Professor and Director, Institute of International Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China |
India Quarterly
This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics
Manuscripts should be submitted via email to editor.iq@icwa.in. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.
Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of India Quarterly will be reviewed.
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this Journal. Open Access options are available - see section 3.3 below.
As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere.
Please note that India Quarterly does not accept submissions of papers that have been posted on preprint servers.
If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journal Solutions Portal
1. What do we publish?
1.1 Aims & Scope
1.2 Article types
1.3 Writing your paper
2. Editorial policies
2.1 Peer review policy
2.2 Authorship
2.3 Acknowledgements
2.4 Funding
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
2.6 Research Data
3. Publishing policies
3.1 Publication ethics
3.2 Contributor’s publishing agreement
3.3 Open access and author archiving
4. Preparing your manuscript
4.1 Formatting
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
4.3 Supplemental material
4.4 Reference style
5. Submitting your manuscript
5.1 ORCID
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
5.3 Permissions
6. On acceptance and publication
6.1 Sage Production
6.2 Online First publication
6.3 Access to your published article
6.4 Promoting your article
Before submitting your manuscript to India Quarterly, please ensure you have read the Aims & Scope.
India Quarterly aims to encourage scholars, policy makers, and analysts to contribute original articles on matters concerning international relations and national foreign policies. It promotes objective analysis on themes of critical importance for understanding international affairs. Conceptually sound, empirically grounded and policy-oriented articles are particularly encouraged. Falling within its purview are regional and global concerns which have the potential to lead to cooperation, regional or global institution building or interstate conflict such as environmental issues, energy security, identity-centric differences, cross-border movements of people, internal demographic displacements, global and regional political economy and diplomatic history. The opinions expressed in the India Quarterly are those of the authors and need not necessarily be in conformity with that of the ICWA. Apart from articles, the journal also features a book review section and often, commentaries.
- Contributors must provide complete postal and e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. In case there are two or more authors of an article, the corresponding author’s name and affiliation details should be clearly specified.
- Please submit a two-sentence bio stating the author's current affiliation, primary research interests and/or most notable publications.
- It is the author’s responsibility to disclose any potential conflict of interest regarding the manuscript.
- Authors will be provided with a copyright form once the contribution is accepted for publication. The submission will be considered as final only after the filled-in and signed copyright form is received. In case there are two or more authors, only the corresponding author needs to sign the copyright form.
- The preferred length of an article is between 6,500 and 7,000 words, including references and endnotes. Endnotes, when used, should be numbered serially and presented at the end of the paper. An endnote must contain more than a mere reference. There is no limit on the number of references allowed. All articles must be accompanied by an abstract of 150–200 words together with approximately six keywords..
- Book reviews should be between 1,200 and 1,500 words with full details of the book reviewed including the subtitle, the name of the author, place of publication, name of publisher, year of publication, number of pages and the price. Notes should be numbered serially and presented as endnotes. Notes, other than website sources (with access date), must contain more than a mere reference.
- Tables should be submitted in MS Excel or MS Word. All figures should have a resolution of minimum 300 dpi, 1,500 pixels, min width 4 inches and their format should be TIFF or JPEG. Do not provide an excessive formatting for tables and figures. Due permissions should be taken for copyright protected photographs/images.
- British spellings must be used throughout (‘labour’ not ‘labor’, ‘centre’ not ‘center’); universal ‘s’ in ‘-ise’ and ‘-isation’ words.
- Single quotes throughout; double quotes used within single quotes. Spellings of words in quotations should not be changed.
- For numbers use ‘nineteenth century’, ‘1980s’. Spell out numbers from one to nine, 10 and above to remain in figures. However, for exact measurements use only figures (3 km, 9 per cent not %). Use thousands, millions and billions, not lakhs and crores.
The Sage Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance their article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
1.3.1 Make your article discoverable
For information and guidance on how to make your article more discoverable, visit our Gateway page on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online
India Quarterly adheres to a rigorous double-anonymize reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are always concealed from both parties. The reviewers are requested to assess the article’s contribution to existing knowledge; its research questions; clarity of expression, methodology, premises and conclusions.
All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.
If the named authors for a manuscript change at any point between submission and acceptance, an Authorship Change Form must be completed and digitally signed by all authors (including any added or removed) . An addition of an author is only permitted following feedback raised during peer review. Completed forms can be uploaded at Revision Submission stage or emailed to the Journal Editorial Office contact (listed on the journal’s manuscript submission guidelines). All requests will be moderated by the Editor and/or Sage staff.
Important: Changes to the author by-line by adding or deleting authors are NOT permitted following acceptance of a paper.
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Please supply any personal acknowledgements separately to the main text to facilitate anonymous peer review.
2.3.1 Writing assistance
Individuals who provided writing assistance, e.g. from a specialist communications company, do not qualify as authors and so should be included in the Acknowledgements section. Authors must disclose any writing assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input – and identify the entity that paid for this assistance. It is not necessary to disclose use of language polishing services.
India Quarterly requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
India Quarterly encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the Sage Journal Author Gateway
The journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
- share your research data in a relevant public data repository
- include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, we encourage you to consider using the statement to explain why it cannot be shared.
- cite this data in your research
Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the Sage Author Gateway
3.1.1 Plagiarism
India Quarterly and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the Journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.
3.1.2 Prior publication
If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a Sage journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the Sage Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.
3.2 Contributor’s publishing agreement
Before publication, Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Sage’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the Sage Author Gateway
3.3 Open access and author archiving
India Quarterly offers optional open access publishing via the Sage Choice programme and Open Access agreements, where authors can publish open access either discounted or free of charge depending on the agreement with Sage. Find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage. For more information on Open Access publishing options at Sage please visit Sage Open Access. For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit Sage’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies.
4. Preparing your manuscript for submission
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. LaTeX files are also accepted. A LaTex template is available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines
Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online and in the print issue. There is no charge for reproducing figures in colour in the printed version.
This Journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files
India Quarterly adheres to the APA reference style. View the APA guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.
Manuscripts should be submitted via email to editor.iq@icwa.in
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.
We encourage all authors and co-authors to link their ORCIDs to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. We collect ORCID IDs during the manuscript submission process and your ORCID ID then becomes part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID ID is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.
If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed in the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. Please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).
Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the Sage Author Gateway
6. On acceptance and publication
Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via email, and corrections should be made directly or notified to us promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate.
Online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication. Visit the Sage Journals help page for more details, including how to cite Online First articles.
6.3 Access to your published article
Sage provides authors with online access to their final article.
Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The Sage Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.
Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the IQQ editorial office as follows:
The Editor, India Quarterly, at Indian Council of World Affairs, Sapru House, 01, Barakhambha Road, New Delhi 110 001. editor.iq@icwa.in