Focus & Scope

Politics and Animals is an international, multidisciplinary, and peer-reviewed academic journal with Open Access for maximum visibility and dissemination of research results. It covers topics of interest to academics from the humanities, the social and natural sciences, as well as policy and law makers in animal-related areas and a general audience interested in animal issues and advocacy.

Politics and Animals is attentive to the diversity of views and competing dispositions that humans have towards animals. Effectively capturing this diversity requires inclusion of both theoretical argument and empirical research devoted to the political dimensions of the human-animal relationship. The aim of the journal is not to favour any particular perspective over another, but instead to establish a place for debate and contestation over these dispositions towards the human, the animal, and the interface between them. Doing so will create space for challenging existing norms and expanding our understanding of the consequences and possibilities that human-animal relations have for politics, and vice versa.

A long history of political development rests on the ever changing relations between human and animal. For most of this history, however, political discussion about nonhuman animals has been confined to managerial frames, limiting the space for critical inquiry into the relations of power underpinning human-animal interactions. Yet the politics of animals is clearly a legitimate and germane area of research, and the topic has seen a resurgence in the political realm and the growing field of animal studies. Productive engagement with the essentially political nature of human-animal interactions requires attention to the (dis)advantages of social cooperation, the exercise of power in the shaping of society, and the treatment of the most vulnerable and marginalized. The politics of animals aims to bring to light the in- or exclusion in the political arena of animals as species and as individuals, the attribution of shares, rights and obligations for and in relation to animals, and the evaluation of competing claims and claimants. The main concern of Politics and Animals is therefore, most generally, to introduce political inquiry into the politics of the human-animal relationship, from the vantage point of political science and theory.