Call for Chapters: Informing Global Legal and Political Culture With Comparative Historical Research

Editors

Nilufar Babakhanova, Tashkent State Transport University, Uzbekistan

Call for Chapters

Proposals Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026
 Full Chapters Due: December 31, 2026
 Submission Date: December 31, 2026

Introduction

Legal and political cultures are not formed in a vacuum. They are shaped by long historical trajectories — by constitutional moments, imperial legacies, religious and philosophical traditions, codifications and revolutions, colonial encounters, and the transnational circulation of legal and political ideas. In an era of rapid globalization, contested sovereignty, democratic backsliding, and multipolar reordering, understanding the historical foundations of contemporary legal and political life has become both an intellectual necessity and a practical imperative. Comparative historical research offers a powerful methodological lens for this task. By tracing institutional pathways across time and space, comparing constitutional and legal traditions, examining the formation and transformation of political cultures, and connecting macro-historical structures with micro-level practices, comparative historical scholarship illuminates how present-day legal and political orders are constituted and how they might evolve. Bringing together law, political science, history, sociology, and area studies, this approach enables a richer understanding of phenomena ranging from the rule of law and constitutionalism to authoritarianism, populism, transitional justice, and the politics of memory. Yet despite a vibrant body of scholarship in comparative law, comparative politics, and historical sociology, the literature remains fragmented across disciplines and regional silos. Practitioners — judges, legislators, policymakers, and legal educators working across jurisdictions — and scholars seeking integrative frameworks lack rigorously edited reference works that bring comparative historical research to bear on the global legal and political culture of the twenty-first century. This edited reference book, to be published by IGI Global, will bring together international scholars and practitioners to examine how comparative historical research informs and reshapes our understanding of global legal and political culture. We invite chapter proposals that combine methodological rigor with substantive comparative depth, and that contribute to a globally inclusive dialogue across legal traditions, political systems, and historical experiences.

Objective

The volume pursues four interrelated objectives: • Methodological consolidation. To consolidate and advance comparative historical methods as applied to law, politics, and political culture, integrating insights from comparative law, historical sociology, political science, and area studies. • Comparative empirical depth. To produce a comparative dataset of historical and contemporary case studies covering the major legal traditions and political cultures across all world regions, including Western, post-Soviet, Islamic, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. • Operational relevance. To equip judges, legislators, constitutional designers, policymakers, and legal educators with historically grounded, comparatively informed frameworks for navigating contemporary legal and political challenges. • Pluralistic scholarship. To showcase regionally diverse research traditions and indigenous, vernacular, and non-Western legal-political knowledge alongside mainstream Euro-American frameworks, in line with IGI Global's commitment to international and regionally diverse authorship.

Target Audience

This reference book will serve a broad academic and practitioner readership, including: • Academic researchers and faculty in comparative law, comparative politics, legal history, political theory, historical sociology, international relations, and area studies. • PhD candidates and advanced master's students working on constitutional history, comparative legal traditions, political culture, and transitional justice. • Judges, constitutional court justices, legislative drafters, and constitutional designers engaged with comparative legal reasoning. • Policymakers in ministries of justice, foreign affairs, and constitutional development; staff of constitutional commissions and law reform bodies. • Analysts and program officers at international organizations: UN OHCHR, UNDP Rule of Law programs, Council of Europe (Venice Commission), OSCE/ODIHR, IDEA International, the World Bank Justice Reform program, and regional human rights bodies. • Legal educators, curriculum designers, and law school faculty seeking comparative materials for teaching. • Think tanks, civil society organizations, and journalists covering rule of law, constitutionalism, democracy, and historical justice.

Recommended Topics

We invite chapter proposals on, but not limited to, the following themes. Authors are encouraged to propose additional topics within the scope of the volume. Methodological and Theoretical Foundations • Comparative historical methods in law and political science: traditions, debates, and innovations • Path dependency, critical junctures, and institutional change in legal-political development • Historical sociology of law and the state • Political culture: conceptual frameworks from Almond and Verba to contemporary scholarship • Memory, narrative, and identity in legal and political cultures Constitutional and Legal Traditions • Civil law, common law, religious law, and customary law: comparative historical trajectories • The making and remaking of constitutions: comparative constitutional moments • Codification movements and their historical legacies • Judicial review and the historical emergence of constitutional courts • Rule of law: historical genealogies across civilizational contexts Political Cultures in Historical Perspective • Democratic and authoritarian political cultures: historical formations and transformations • Populism, nationalism, and historical memory • Civil society, citizenship, and historical pathways • Legal consciousness and everyday legality in comparative perspective • Religion, secularism, and political culture across regions Empire, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Legacies • Imperial legal orders and their long shadows on contemporary law • Colonial codifications and post-independence legal reform • Decolonizing comparative law and political theory • Transitional justice and reckoning with historical injustice Globalization, Transnationalism, and Legal Change • Diffusion and translation of legal ideas across borders • International law, human rights, and comparative historical foundations • Legal pluralism and the interaction of state, customary, and religious law • Borrowing, transplant, and resistance in constitutional design Comparative and Regional Perspectives • Western Europe and North America: constitutional traditions and democratic culture • Central and Eastern Europe: post-communist legal transformation and rule-of-law backsliding • Russia, Central Asia, and the post-Soviet space: legal and political cultures in transition • East Asia: Confucian legacies, modernization, and contemporary constitutionalism • South Asia: pluralism, religious law, and constitutional democracy • The Islamic world: Sharia, statehood, and modern constitutional design • Latin America: caudillismo, constitutionalism, and democratic recurrence • Africa: customary law, post-colonial constitutionalism, and African Union frameworks • Indigenous legal traditions and contemporary legal pluralism Contemporary Challenges in Historical Perspective • Democratic backsliding and authoritarian retrenchment in long-term perspective • Rule-of-law crises and historical resilience • Transitional justice, truth commissions, and memorialization • Migration, citizenship, and the historical politics of belonging • Digital transformation, AI, and the historical foundations of legal-political authority

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before August 15, 2026, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by September 15, 2026 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines.Full chapters of a minimum of 10,000 words (word count includes references and related readings) are expected to be submitted by December 31, 2026, and all interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at https://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-anonymized review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Informing Global Legal and Political Culture With Comparative Historical Research. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-anonymized peer review editorial process.

All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery® online submission manager.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global Scientific Publishing, an international academic publisher of the "Information Science Reference", "Medical Information Science Reference", "Business Science Reference", and "Engineering Science Reference" imprints. IGI Global Scientific Publishing specializes in publishing reference books, scholarly journals, and electronic databases featuring academic research on a variety of innovative topic areas including, but not limited to, education, social science, medicine and healthcare, business and management, information science and technology, engineering, public administration, library and information science, media and communication studies, and environmental science. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit https://www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2027.

Indexing Information for Prospective Authors

IGI Global Scientific Publishing meets the criteria for inclusion in major indexing services such as Scopus; however, it is important to note that all indexing decisions are made independently by these services. IGI Global Scientific Publishing books are selectively indexed by the indexing organization after publication. Indexing cannot be guaranteed for any book prior to publication, and the indexing organization has complete control over the final selection and timeline.

Important Dates

August 15, 2026: Proposal Submission Deadline
September 15, 2026: Notification of Acceptance
December 31, 2026: Full Chapter Submission
December 31, 2026: Final Chapter Submission

Inquiries

Nilufar Babakhanova Tashkent State Transport University Lunalika1@mail.ru
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