CAA Enters its Fifteenth Year of Publication

Abstract

Since the publication of its first issue in January 2008, Contemporary Arab Affairs (CAA) has travelled a long way. At the very beginning, the board of directors of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies (CAUS), a well-known think tank and a publisher in Arabic, decided to issue an international quarterly journal in English. The objective was to publish and circulate authentic research and studies originally produced in Arabic, thus making them available to an international audience in order to promote constructive dialogue on Arab political, socio-economic, and cultural affairs.The editorial of the first issue of CAA identified its goal as establishing “a bridge linking the Arab world to the international community.” Putting it differently, the goal was to communicate research from the region and about the region to non-Arabic-speaking scholars, researchers, and policymakers. The first few years of the journal dedicated most of its content to translations of Arabic papers that originally appeared in journals published by CAUS.As CAA reached Western scholarship and academic circles, it established itself among area studies journals and encouraged an increasing number of scholars, Arab and non-Arab, from all over the world to submit papers written originally in English. Today, around only twenty-five percent of the journal’s content is translated from Arabic: the rest is submitted in English for CAA’s consideration.Over the last fifteen years, CAA has proved itself as a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that publishes high-quality, original research from and about the Arab region. Its articles have been diverse in terms of subject matter, theoretical frameworks, and research methodology.The journal’s articles deal with the factors and forces that have shaped the contemporary Arab world. It has analyzed the Arab uprisings and the hybrid or proxy wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. It has discussed different theoretical aspects and case studies on terrorism, democratization, civil–military relations, the changing role of women, and oil economics and industry. Articles have also covered controversial issues such as “the triangle of autocracy, oil, and foreign powers,” “The Arab regional system: question of survival,” “internalized Arab diasporic identity,” “beyond rentierism,” and “the political economy of democratic transition.” Content has been limited not only to Arab countries, but also there have been various articles on Israel, Turkey, and Iran, as well as international actors such as the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union.Thus, the journal focuses on changes in Arab states and societies, and their relations with the regional and global environment. It centers on contemporary political, economic, and social affairs in the Arab world, including cultural and historical aspects that impact the present.CAA’s ranking has continued to improve year on year, and it is now considered an influential journal in its realm.According to data released by Scopus in January 2022, CAA has a CiteScore 2020 of 0.5. This measures average citations received per document published in the serial.CAA gained an SJR 2020 score of 0.112. This refers to the SCImago Journal Rank, which measures weighted citations received by the serial. Citation weighting depends on the subject field and prestige (SJR) of the citing serial.As for the SNP 2020, CAA has earned a score of 0.334. This refers to source normalized impact per paper. It measures actual citations received, relative to citations expected, for the serial’s subject field.CAA holds the 400th rank amongst 1037 journals in the field of cultural studies and thus occupies the 61st percentile in this field.In the field of political science and international relations, CAA is placed in 373rd rank amongst 556 journals and occupies the 33rd percentile.CAA’s main mission is to be a platform for voices from the region and to provide the opportunity for them to be part of global academic and policy debates. Another component of its mission is to offer indigenous narratives of events and developments taking place in the Arab world and the Middle East. In doing so, CAA joins other journals published in the Global South in encouraging different traditions in social science research that break away from Western ethnocentrism.CAA will continue to publish relevant and in-depth articles on internal, regional, and international issues related to the Arab world with an emphasis on the theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature. It will also keep encouraging comparative research of political, economic, and social institutions and behaviors. The journal’s editorial policy is to encourage the publication of articles written by young scholars experimenting with new ideas and methodologies.We hope that Contemporary Arab Affairs will continue to communicate new ideas and research findings to social scientists, graduate students, and policymakers.