EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the second issue of the Sports Law, Policy & Diplomacy Journal. When we launched the journal at the beginning of the year, we mentioned that this will not be just a marathon, but an ultra-trail. After all the training over the year and the hard work, we are not even at the first time-control point of the race. We are pleased to see the number of submissions during the year, some of which are of an excellent quality and having passed external review, appear in this second issue.
This issue is an excellent representation of the potential of the journal. We present five papers. Two are heavily focussed on EU sport policy issues, one explores governance/regulatory issues and the reaming two are extremely interesting papers evaluating sport in developing countries. Our journal has started with a Euro-centric focus given where it is edited and the academic community that launched it, but we hope that, with time, our papers will also include a more global outlook, for sports law, policy and diplomacy are certainly not only European issues. The current state of world (and sporting) affairs amply highlights that point.
We are glad to see a relatively good stream of papers being submitted, but as we are only taking our first steps, we need to reiterate the call we made in our last editorial. Please help the Sports Law, Policy & Diplomacy Journal grow by submitting your quality papers, ideas for special issues or joining our pool of reviewers. We really need you to develop the journal. We are perfectly aware the business of publishing is competitive, but we will only be able to reclaim research and publishing for the academic community if journals such as this are successful.
In this issue you will be able to read papers on gender equity, on the European Model of Sport and EU normative actorness, as well as papers looking at sport in Africa and the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s approach to athletes from developing countries. It is a great mixture of topics embracing a diversity of disciplines, from law to political sciences and European integration theories. We are pleased to see that some of the papers were presented at the Sport&EU annual conference. We also encourage you to use our annual conference as a first stage to present your research, whilst keeping us in mind for the publication.
We would like to finish this editorial by thanking the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Law for their constant support in the production of the journal. This will not be possible without them. Equally, we would like to thank all the reviewers that have contributed to make this issue possible.
We hope to receive your papers, so we can start preparing our issues in 2024.
Vanja Smokvina, Richard Parrish & Borja Garcia Garcia
Editors-in-Chief