A Small Journal for (ever) Smaller Audience? The Czech Journal of International Relations between national community and internationalization

The paper builds on the recent forum that discussed the end of the Czech version of the Czech Journal of International Relations (CJIR) and reflects on the question who is the audience of smaller journals on the periphery of the global discipline of the International Relations and what role do such journals play. Approaching the tensions stemming from relations with different publics and embededness in different scientific fields through the institutional experience of the Czech Journal of International Relations in the past three decades and a personal experience of editing the journal, the paper seeks to answer the main question by inquiring the three axes of journal’s relations to broader social fields. These are the position of the journal in the national and international scientific fields and relations with the state. As the paper argues, the position of smaller national journals in the global (semi)peripheries, such as CJIR, necessarily stems from the national scientific community. However, the decisions taken on the state level which privilege integration to the international discipline leave smaller journals in precarious position that is increasingly alienated both from the national community and not being able to sufficiently integrate to the international scientific fields. In the concluding section, the paper discusses the impact of this in-between position for the knowledge production and specifically asks who the audience of this fomr of knowledge production is.