Articles submitted to the Journal should be original contributions. They should not be under consideration by another journal, nor have been published or be awaiting publication elsewhere. Translations of articles that have already been published will not be accepted. If an author is publishing a closely related article elsewhere, this fact should be stated in a cover note to the editors.

Articles must be at least 10,000 words in length and no longer than 12,000 words, including footnotes, tables etc. The Journal accepts and publishes manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The Journal's preference is that manuscripts should be submitted electronically via the online submission system as a Word document, with double spacing throughout and margins of at least one inch all round. All pages must be numbered consecutively. In order to ensure the anonymity of the reviewing process, care should be taken to ensure that any references which might identify the author are removed from the text. The title page should be separate from the main body of the text and include the author's name, e-mail address, academic post and institutional affiliation, the title of the article, and brief acknowledgements. An abstract of no more than 100 words, together with a list of key words, should appear at the beginning of the article.

Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. You can find guidance from Cambridge University Press here.

Author style sheet

This document provides guidelines on how to make your article conform to our in-house style. It might also be useful to look at a recent edition of the journal (from February 2011 onwards). Please note that authors need only conform to the following style sheet following acceptance of their article. Article submissions are welcome in any format. 

If accepted for publication, your article will be professionally copy-edited and you may be contacted to resolve major queries.

Spelling and punctuation. British conventions are used throughout (except in direct quotation); i.e. programme, not program (except for computer programs); labour, not labor; travelled, not traveled, etc.; also use -ise, not -ize; -isation, not -ization. As a guide, check the word on https://languages.oup.com/ (but note that we use -ise instead of their -ize).

Punctuation follows the British system. Punctuation at the end of a quotation follows the quotation marks unless the quoted matter is a grammatically complete sentence beginning with a capital letter.

Use single quotation marks, with double quotes inside single if necessary.

Hyphens are not used for cooperation, neoliberal, bilateral, biotechnology, although they are used for socio-economic, policy-making and policy-makers, Italian-born, non-resident, vice-president, mid-nineteenth, Euro-Brazilian, nation-state, as well as long-term (when used as an adjective) and fractions, e.g. one-fifth.

Use initial capital letters for the Cuban Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Church, the Catholic Church, the Constitution, the Revolution, Cold War, as well as for political parties or organisations, hence the Partido Justicialista or the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, and also for the Right and the Left in politics. But please note that right-wing and left-wing, rightist and leftist, centre-left and centre-right are lower case.

Compass points: north-east, south-west. South-East Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the [global socio-economic] East, West, North and South; western hemisphere and eastern hemisphere are lower case.

Do not use a capital letter when referring to 'the state' or 'the government', or when referring, for examle, to a particular presidential administration, e.g., the García administration. Use upper case for titles such as 'president' or 'king' only when attched directly to the individual's name – 'it was a difficult period for President Obama' but 'it was a difficult period for the US president'.

Use per cent and not percent (we retain % if used in a quotation or in a table), and always precede it with the Arabic form of the number, never a word, e.g. 10 per cent, not ten per cent.

Currency. Use the symbol before the amount in Arabic numbers and avoid longhand. So, US$2 billion and avoid two billion US dollars. Be clear in using the symbol $ whether it refers to US dollars or to other currencies, so use Reais$ on first use and R$ thereafter, and Mex$ and MX$ thereafter for Mexican pesos.

If convention implies a different notation, for example the use of m$n for Argentina in the nineteenth century, then please indicate.

If helpful to the reader, then provide a conversion to US$ noting the date of conversion.

Non-English words should be italicised only if they are not in common use in English. Examples include inquilinos and machetazo. Words that have common usage in English can remain in roman (non italics), such as machismo, hacienda, pseo, and favela.

Names of organisations, government departments, companies, banks, etc. whether written in English, Spanish or Portuguese should not be italicised. Names of journals and newspapers should always be italicised (see below, References).

Accents must be given, including on captial letters, with particular attention to the correct spelling and accenting of proper names and place names.

Initials and acronyms should be preceded by the full form at first mention, e.g. 'the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'. Acronym initials such as UNRISD, ILO, FAO etc. do not use stops. (Note that the digraph 'US' – without stops – is used adjectivally, as in 'US policy'; as a noun the name is spelled out, as in 'X travelled to the United States').

When the organisation name is written in anything other than English, cite in full original language followed by the English translation in parenthesis, followed by the conventional acronym. Thus, Unión Civica Radical (Radical Civic Union, UCR).

Note, the Journal does not use 'America' or 'American' as shorthand to refer to 'the United States of America', its citizens, its policy or its institutions; use 'the United States' as the noun, and US as the adjective. We also use Argentine not Argentinean, Salvadorean not Salvadoran or Salvadorian, and Ecuadorean rather than Ecuadorian.

Numbers up to and including ten should always be spelled out. Never begin a sentence with a numeral – always spell it out (e.g. 'Forty-seven days later, the government fell.'). Commas should be used in numbers with four or more figures, so 1,000 and 29,000, but use 1.5 million rather than 1,500,000. Latin American and European authors should note that in English usage the decimal point is full stop, not a comma, e.g. 47.5, not 47,5.

Dates should be: 25 November 1981 (without punctuation). Centuries should be spelled out in full, e.g. nineteenth century not 19th century. Hyphenate as an adjective, e.g. 'a nineteenth-century journal' and 'twenty-first century crisis'.

Months should be spelled out in the text, but in footnotes March to July should be in full, and Aug. to Feb. should be abbreviated.

Quotations of fewer than 60 words should be in single quotation marks. Longer quotations should be set off from the text with a line space above and below and inset without quotation marks.

Quotations in Spanish or Portuguese should normally be translated.

Subheadings should be used to sectionalise the paper in order to make it easier for the reader to follow. The top level of subheadings is placed in italics in the centre of the page, the second level is in italics with left-hand justification. Do not use more than two levels of headings, and do not number or letter them. Headings should be in maximum capitalisation (all significant words capitalised).

Tables, maps, diagrams, and illustrations should be kept to a minimum, and must always be referred to in the text. If the article is accepted for publication the author will be asked to provide source files of the tables and graphs.

For illustrations, including plates and maps, please provide high quality monochrome images as tif files. For further details of file formats please see Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

If you request colour figures in the printed version, there may be a need to pay a fee to Cambridge University Press. You will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.

Please indicate in the text the approximate position of tables and figures.

Table and Figure headings: Headings appear in italic above the table with caps on all significant words. Source appears below table/figure. For example