The Journal REGION: Crossing Borders and Connecting Eurasia to the Glocalizing World

Preparations for the Publication of REGION

It has been four years since we started discussions on the publication of REGION. In order to explain why we gave our journal its name, we think we should start by mentioning the research project that the Institute of Russian Studies (IRS) of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies was working on at the time. IRS was selected as the research institute for the Humanities Korea (HK) Project, initiated by the National Research Foundation of Korea, in November 2009 under its research agenda proposal entitled “Reconstructing Dimensions of Russian Humanities: A Korean Perspective.” The Humanities Korea Project was founded by the government and was to be carried out over a 10-year period. One of the most notable features of the IRS’s research agenda is that it focused on the analysis of Russia’s politics, economy, culture, society, and history at the local level, instead of at the national or governmental level, as previous research has done. While carrying out this project, the HK Research Team of IRS decided that it should publish an international journal so that the research agenda could be shared not only in domestic academic circles but also in foreign academia, and that we could share various research results on diverse topics. It was against this backdrop that we decided to name the journal “REGION,” a title symbolizing the aim and goal of the HK Research Team.

In formulating our Editorial Department, we contacted many scholars from Russia, North America, Europe, including Eastern Europe, and Asia, including Central Asia, and selected those we thought would fit well while taking into consideration several different factors such as their fields of expertise, presence as scholars, and nationality, as well as regional balance. Currently, the fields of expertise of our editors include politics, economy, society, history, geography, folklore, literature, and culture, and our Editorial Department consists of 25 editors from 8 countries around the world—Russia, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, China, and South Korea—including the Managing Editor and the Book Review Editor. We are very grateful to all of the editors who accepted our offer without hesitation when we explained the purpose of our journal. REGION’s editors come from various academic and regional backgrounds and are renowned in their respective fields of expertise. They play an important role in improving the quality of our journal even further by evaluating the manuscripts we receive and encouraging the submission of high-quality articles to our journal in various areas.

As for the publication of REGION, we chose Slavica Publishers to publish our journal on behalf of IRS. Slavica Publishers is affiliated with Indiana University, and it publishes specialty books and journals on Slavic studies. Indiana University is known to have a number of highly reputable research institutes and graduate school programs on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, and Slavica Publishers has published the results of many prominent studies in these areas, helping Indiana University establish its strong reputation. After going through this long process, the first issue of REGION was published in January 2012. So far a total of seven issues, including the current issue, have been published, with two issues published per year.

Features and Contents of REGION

REGION’s scope of geographical coverage extends not only to Russia but also to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This is because many of the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia were once socialist countries and thus share many similarities with Russia in terms of politics, economy, society, and culture. Also, it should be noted that the title “REGION” is not intended to mean only the regions of a single country. It also refers to wider regions such as the East Asian region, East European region, Central Asian region, and Eurasian region as a whole. So, in our journal, we would like to retain the multiple meanings of the term “region.”

It may also be worthwhile to note that the meaning of...