Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.[1] Founded on 15 September 1922, the print magazine is currently published every two months, while the website publishes articles daily and anthologies every other month.
This article is about the magazine. For other uses, see Foreign affairs (disambiguation).Editor
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Political science, foreign affairs, and economics
Bimonthly
195,016
September 15, 1922
United States
English
Foreign Affairs is considered one of the United States' most influential foreign policy magazines. Over its long history, it has published a number of seminal articles including George Kennan's "X Article", published in 1947, and Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations", published in 1993.[2][3]
Leading academics, public officials, and members of the policy community regularly contribute to the magazine. Recent Foreign Affairs authors include Robert O. Keohane, Hillary Clinton, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin L. Powell, Francis Fukuyama, David Petraeus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John J. Mearsheimer, Stanley McChrystal, Christopher R. Hill and Joseph Nye.[4]
Since its inception, Foreign Affairs has included a long book review section, typically reviewing 50 or more books per issue. The magazine's first editor, Archibald Cary Coolidge, asked his Harvard colleague, William L. Langer, a historian and World War I veteran, to run the section. Langer initially had full control over the magazine's book reviews and did all the reviews by himself. A month before the reviews were due, the Foreign Affairs office in New York would ship approximately one hundred books to Langer for review and within two weeks he would return his completed reviews for the next issue.
Beginning with the first issue in 1922, Harry Elmer Barnes authored a reoccurring section titled “Some Recent Books on International Relations”. By 1924, the Foreign Affairs website lists Barnes as Bibliographical Editor.[16]
In the late 1930s, the review section was broken down into several categories. Currently, the Foreign Affairs reviews are broken down into long review essays, which are placed at the front of the books section, and the "Recent Books" section, where shorter reviews are featured. The "Recent Books" section is further broken down into the following subject categories.
The majority of the book reviews featured in the "Recent Books" section are reviewed by the same person; however, other reviewers contribute to the "Recent Books" section on occasion.
Influence[edit]
Foreign Affairs is considered an important forum for debate among academics and policy makers. In 1996, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott noted: "Virtually everyone I know in the foreign policy-national security area of the Government is attentive to Foreign Affairs."[17]
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 2.009, ranking it 6th out of 85 journals in the category "International Relations".[18]
