There is a spectre haunting our planet: a ghost in the machine. The accelerating ‘fourth industrial revolution’ has summoned up technologies capable of transforming politics worldwide—tools with the potential to make good governance easy governance too. As the state has become larger and more complex, the machinery of state has grown too, ever more vital in guiding and supporting citizens’ lives. Successive breakthroughs in AI give techno-optimists reason to dream of a world (and a politics) defined by abundance.
Yet something is amiss in this mechanised, mechanistic world. Far from serving as an engine of informed civil discourse, communication technologies have supercharged political emotions. The rationalised governance of the modern state makes citizens cogs in a Weberian ‘iron cage’. Meanwhile, global religious revival serves to illustrate the discontents of technological modernity. And the rapid progress of AI itself poses questions about our account of the human in a transhumanist age: one with serious implications for discussions of rights, responsibility, and identity.
In this issue of the Oxford Political Review, we want to exorcise the ghost—not to drive it out, just to ask it what it wants. We seek submissions on the theme ‘ghost in the machine’, of which we welcome imaginative interpretations.
Please submit pieces up to 2000 words by 23:59 BST on 18 January 2026 via the form at this link. Please follow the additional guidelines may be found below. Queries may be sent to submissions@oxfordpoliticalreview.com.
Submissions should fall into the broad categories of global politics, culture and ideas, and law, such as:
Global Politics
- AI warfare
- Politics and religion in a digital age
- Technologies of control and resistance
- The machinery of state, such as lobbying and bureaucracy
Culture and Ideas
- Religious revival
- Transhumanism
- Artwork in the age of digital production
Law
- AI, liability and regulation
- Law of war and technology
- Law and religion
Potential Books for Review
- Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI, Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (2024)
- Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini (2025)
- The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity, Steven D. Smith (2023)
- The Invisible Source of Authority. God in a Secular Age, David Walsh (2025)
- Radical Abundance. How to Win a Green Democratic Future, Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell (2025)
- Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao (2025)
- The MANIAC, Benjamin Labatut (2023)
Submission Guidelines
The deadline for submissions is 18 January 2026 at 23:59.
Submissions should take the following format:
- Long-form articles consisting of no more than 2,000 words
- Book reviews and review essays of no more than 1,500 words
- Interviews of no more than 2,000 words
For our submission guidelines, please see this link and our style guide is here.
Please submit using the form at this link. Do not submit files in PDF format. Direct any queries to oxfordpoliticalreview@gmail.com.
We typically have more submissions than we can accept. If we like your submission but cannot accept it for the print issue, we will publish it separately online.