What the Editorial Board actually does
“Editorial board” should not be decorative. In a serious journal, the board has clear, non-negotiable responsibilities: defining scope, maintaining standards of evidence, protecting the integrity of peer review, and ensuring that published material remains citeable and verifiable years later. That means saying “no” to weak submissions, unclear methods, untraceable claims, and politically loaded framing that isn’t backed by sources.
In defence and security research, bad editorial discipline creates real damage: sloppy citations become recycled “facts,” institutional myths get repeated, and policy arguments drift away from evidence. The board exists to stop that drift.
Board structure (roles you can expect in a peer-reviewed journal)
- Editor-in-Chief / Director: sets editorial direction, makes final decisions, ensures independence.
- Associate/Section Editors: manage submissions by topic area (defence policy, civil–military relations, regional security, etc.).
- Managing Editor: coordinates workflow, copyediting, schedules, and production consistency.
- Editorial Secretariat: handles correspondence, file integrity, metadata, and archive consistency.
- Advisory Board: supports long-term direction, standards, and institutional credibility.
This structure matters because it prevents single-person gatekeeping. Good editorial governance spreads responsibility across roles, keeps decisions traceable, and reduces bias by forcing justification: what was accepted, why, and under which criteria.
Editorial standards: what gets accepted
The board prioritizes work that is argument-driven, evidence-based, and honest about its limits. Whether a piece is a research article, a policy analysis, or a documentary extract, it should meet the minimum standard of traceability: readers must be able to locate the sources and verify the claims.
A strong submission typically has:
- a precise research question (not a vague theme);
- a clear claim that can be tested or challenged;
- identifiable evidence (documents, datasets, fieldwork, case comparison, archival sources);
- clean citations and stable references;
- a conclusion that follows from evidence, not from ideology.
If a submission relies on “everyone knows” logic, anonymous assertions, or recycled talking points without sources, it’s not a research contribution. It’s noise.
Peer review, ethics, and corrections
FASOC is listed as a peer-reviewed journal in major regional directories. That implies a duty to run a serious review process, not a rubber-stamp. Editors select reviewers with topic competence and manage conflicts of interest. The editorial workflow should protect reviewer independence, enforce confidentiality, and require authors to respond to critique with evidence.
Ethics is not a slogan. The board must be willing to correct the record: publish errata when citations or data are wrong, clarify ambiguous claims, and withdraw material if integrity is compromised. A journal that cannot correct itself is not a reliable archive-especially in security studies, where narratives travel faster than evidence.
Historical editorial credits (example from an archived issue)
Editorial boards change over time. Archived issues commonly include a printed “Consejo Editor” (editorial council) listing. For example, a 2000 issue page lists names such as Antonio Cortés, Roberto Durán, Hugo Espinoza, and Gonzalo García as part of the editorial council. These listings are valuable for historical citation context, but they should not be treated as the current board unless confirmed by the most recent issue record.
Institutional context
FASOC is associated with the research ecosystem around FLACSO-Chile and a Latin American defence and disarmament research framework. The journal is widely indexed and cataloged as a research publication in the social sciences, including defence and security and international relations, with the print ISSN 0717-1498. These directory records provide the stable identifiers that make archival scholarship discoverable and properly citeable.