Call for Papers: Revista de Direito Economico e Socioambiental (Scopus, DOAJ) - Special Dossier on Democratic Resilience in Brazil, Vol. 18 No. 2

The Revista de Direito Economico e Socioambiental (Journal of Economic and Socio-Environmental Law) is the law journal of the Graduate Programme in Law (PPGD) of the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil, published by PUCPRESS. It carries eISSN 2179-8214 and print ISSN 2179-345X, is fully open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and is funded by the PPGD-PUCPR with support from CNPq.

The journal is indexed in Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and also appears in Latindex, Dialnet, ERIH Plus, vLex, Crossref, Google Scholar, WorldCat, BASE, EZB, ZDB, SUDOC, OpenAlex, Diadorim, Miguilim, OASIS and CAPES Periodicos. Its current Scimago record places it in Law with a best quartile of Q3 and an SJR of 0.17 for 2025; CAPES rated it Qualis A1 for the 2021-2024 quadrennium.

The journal has issued a special call for a thematic dossier titled Democratic Resilience in Brazil (Resiliencia democratica no Brasil), organised in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, and the ICCAL (Ius Constitutionale Commune en America Latina) LAB research project.

The dossier is coordinated by Armin von Bogdandy, Mariela Morales Antoniazzi and Carolina Bejarano, all of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.

The call notes that Brazil has in recent years faced a range of challenges testing the solidity of its democratic institutions, including tensions between the branches of government, questions over electoral integrity, digital disinformation and pressure on oversight bodies. Both abrupt and gradual, these processes offer fertile ground for analysing how democratic resilience operates in concrete settings.

The stated aim is to build a repository of concrete Brazilian experiences of democratic resilience, identifying institutional practices, mechanisms and innovations that have proved effective or that offer relevant lessons in the face of democratic erosion. The editors want these analyses to inform comparative debate and to serve as a reference for other regional and global contexts, which is where scholars working on comparative constitutional law outside Brazil can contribute.

Contributions should be anchored in a concrete theme. The call lists the following, expressly on a non-exhaustive basis:

• Judicial independence
• Electoral integrity
• The role of constitutional courts
• Legislative oversight and control
• Institutional capacities
• Freedom of expression and access to information
• Regulation of digital platforms
• Disinformation
• Citizen participation
• Relations between the armed forces and civil authority

Every submission must address the following four elements clearly and in a structured way:

• Identification of the threats: describe the risks, crises or processes of democratic erosion, whether abrupt or gradual, that affect the case under study.
• Determination of the elements affected: specify which components of democracy or the rule of law are compromised, for example free elections, separation of powers, fundamental rights or access to information.
• Analysis of the institutional response: examine how institutions reacted to those threats, including judicial decisions, legislative reforms, administrative action or other relevant practices.
• Assessment of resilience: evaluate the extent to which those responses contributed to the resistance, adaptation or transformation of the democratic system.

The dossier accepts articles exclusively from researchers holding a doctorate. No nationality, jurisdiction or institutional restriction is stated, so doctorate-holding scholars based in India are eligible to submit.

Articles for this dossier are accepted in Portuguese, English and Spanish only.

Under the journal's general author guidelines, at least one author must hold a doctoral degree (Dr., PhD, JSD, LLD or equivalent) and a maximum of three authors is permitted per article, with exceptions for empirical research on written justification.

Articles must be original and unpublished, not under simultaneous consideration elsewhere, and must comply with the author guidelines on the journal's official page. The main requirements are:

• Length of 15 to 30 A4 pages, excluding abstract, keywords and references
• Times New Roman 12 pt with 1.5 line spacing in the body; footnotes in 10 pt single spacing, reserved for explanatory notes
• Margins of 3 cm left and top, 2 cm right and bottom; paragraph indent of 1.5 cm
• Abstract of up to 200 words, without paragraph breaks or citations, plus five keywords in each language
• An English title and abstract are required, or a Portuguese one where the article is written in English
• Author-date citation following ABNT NBR 10520:2023, with the reference list per ABNT NBR 6023:2018
• A declaration of conflicting interests, and the two forms required at submission

All articles go through double blind peer review, with anonymity of both authors and reviewers. Similarity-detection software is applied. Final acceptance depends on the outcome of review and on compliance with the journal's editorial requirements.

The journal's official policy states that submission, processing and publication of articles are free of charge, with no APCs levied on authors. This is confirmed independently by the journal's DOAJ record, which records no article processing charge.

Articles must be submitted exclusively through the official platform of the Revista de Direito Economico e Socioambiental, which requires registering an account on the journal's system. Authors interested in the dossier are asked to include, at the point of submission, an additional note expressly stating that they wish the article to be considered for the special issue.

The deadline for submission of articles is 30 October 2026. Publication is scheduled for Volume 18, Issue 2, May 2027. The journal stresses that meeting the deadline is essential to secure the peer review process and the editorial schedule of the dossier.