Instructions for Website Submissions
If you would like to submit a piece to the roape.net website, please send a short pitch to website.editor@roape.net. We publish a range of contributions, including blog pieces (800 to 1200 words), debate pieces (1000 to 1500 words, see here for the debates we are currently hosting), book reviews or excerpts (1200 to 2000 words), and long reads (up to 4500 words). Please write in an engaging and lively manner (i.e. non-academic language), make use of hyperlinks, and avoid referencing wherever possible.
Instructions for Journal Submissions
Please note that we reserve the right to return material which is not sent to us in the preferred ROAPE style or which has not been carefully edited by the author.
1. Check our guidelines
First, please check that your proposed submission falls within ROAPE’s remit:
“ROAPE has, since 1974, provided radical analysis of trends and issues in Africa. It has paid particular attention to the political economy of inequality, exploitation and oppression, whether driven by global forces or local ones (such as class, race, community and gender), and to materialist interpretations of change in Africa. It has sustained a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa.”
Aside from this substantive remit, we are looking for submissions which present new empirical material, rethink existing literature in a stimulating fashion, or coherently argue a fresh understanding of existing issues. We seek papers which are clearly organised, concisely expressed and free from unnecessary jargon, sexist or other discriminatory language. We may occasionally consider material in languages other than English.
2. Is it an original contribution?
Submissions should be original contributions not previously published (in part or in whole) and not under consideration for any other publication, unless a special case has been made.
3. ROAPE publishes Articles, Debates and Briefings
Briefings are generally short, topical and informative pieces, including documents, with a ‘stop press’ policy for urgent items. Debates require an author to take a position on a controversial topic, either engaging with a previous piece or inviting response. The maximum length for Briefings and Debates is 4,000 words.
Articles are generally longer and aim both to inform the reader and to engage in debate around theory and/or political economy analysis. Our recommended length for an article is not longer than 8,000 words, including footnotes and bibliography. We cannot accept article manuscripts longer than 8,000 words, unless exceptional reasons can be cited.
We also publish reviews of academic and political books, fiction and film. The recommended length is 800 words or up to 2,000 for a review article.
4. Submission procedure
Submissions are made online at Science Open’s Review of African Political Economy site. To submit a manuscript:
- Register on ScienceOpen and link your ORCID account (required!) to your profile. Do not untick email notifications as those will keep you updated throughout the submission process;
- Submit your manuscript as a PDF document via → Submit a manuscript button on the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) landing page;
- Complete the online submission via the user interface/submission form;
- After submission your manuscript will undergo assessment by a journal editor to check for suitability, completeness, and basic scholarly integrity in line with the journal’s publishing policies;
- If approved for peer review, the PDF file will be uploaded as manuscript under submission to the journal and pending for reviewers;
- Once your paper is reviewed, you will be notified via email;
- If accepted, most articles are entered into the Science Open Central Article Tracking System, and a link to the copy-edited proofs, along with any queries for the author(s), are sent to the corresponding author. Authors are requested to implement corrections and reply to all queries and return these within 48 hours.
For further guidance on how to submit a manuscript, and more information on the review process, see here.
5. Style guidelines
While we are willing to help out with editing the work of authors whose first language is not English, we expect other manuscripts to come to us in a finally edited form.
This entails following the guidelines below:
- Any track changes or headers and footers should be removed. Justify text to the left.
- Text should be in Microsoft Word for Windows. PDFs on their own are not accepted.
- All submissions must include a separate file uploaded with the author’s name, current affiliation and contact information (email and postal address, phone numbers) and some brief biographical details. The author’s name should not appear on any other page.
- Before uploading your Word document onto the submissions website, please anonymise it via the menus by selecting File > Check for Issues > Inspect document > Inspect > Document Properties and Personal Information [Remove All] and Inspect > Headers, Footers, and Watermarks [Remove All].
- A list of up to six keywords should be provided. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a means of making your article more visible to anyone who might be looking for it. Guidance is available on the ScholarOne Manuscripts site.
- Notes should be short and kept to a maximum of 10, using your word processor’s endnote function.
- Single quotation marks should be used for quotations within text (with double quotes within these where necessary: e.g. ‘The ANC was particularly keen to promote black ownership and control of the “commanding heights” of the economy’). Where a longer passage is quoted, indent from margin (no quotation marks required). Where a quotation is given, please provide the page number along with the referenced work.
- Paragraphs should be separated by one line space but not indented.
- Please use –ise/-isation spelllings, rather than -ize/-ization – e.g. ‘civilise’ and ‘civilisation’ rather than ‘civilize’ and ‘civilization’.
- is used to denote an immediately prior citation; otherwise the reference should be repeated, e.g. (Annan 2004, 6).
- Graphs, tables, figures, barcharts, maps etc should be numbered and submitted in a separate file, not embedded in the text. A caption and source should be provided for each. Please provide editable files so that captions/axis labels can be amended if necessary. Line drawings and photographs are also welcome – please check with us in relation to format. Illustrations should have a resolution of at least 300 dpi in order to be of sufficient quality to print.
- Please give all abbreviations in full on first use.
- Dates should appear as follows: 9 December 2015; 1990s (no apostrophe); twentieth century.
- Numbers from one to nine in words; percentages and decimals written in figures; fractions spelt out as one-half, three-quarters etc.
In text this means bracketing the author’s surname and date of publication (with page reference where an actual quotation is given): Examples: (Mamdani 2004, 34) and (Rodney 1975; Cliffe 1977; Saul 1974).
At the end of the article only material cited in the text should be listed:
Examples:
Guyer, J. 1987. “Comparative Epilogue.” In Feeding African Cities: Studies in Regional Social History, edited by J. Guyer, 148—154. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mamdani, M. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and the Roots of Terrorism, Kampala: Fountain Publishers.
Ponte, S. 2004. “The Politics of Ownership: Tanzanian Coffee Policy in the Age of Liberal Reformism.” African Affairs 103 (413): 23—49.
Zeilig, L. 2021. Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation. London: I. B. Tauris.
Newspaper titles should be italicised (e.g. The Daily Graphic).
Websites must be cited with a title and/or author. The date of access is only required if the online document is undated, and is then used as year of publication.
Examples:
Littlejohn, G. 2015. “The BRICS New Development Bank and Africa.” Accessed December 9, 2015. https://roape.net/2015/11/16/the-brics-new-development-bank-and-africa/
Hunkins, J. 2015. “Rehad Desai’s ‘Miners Shot Down’ Wins an International Emmy for Best Documentary.” November 24. http://10and5.com/2015/11/24/rehad-desais-miners-shot-down-wins-an-international-emmy-for-best-documentary/