Editorial method

Editorial responsibility

James J. Tennant is the Founding Editor and intellectual architect of The Encyclopedia of Economic Statecraft. He established its scope, taxonomy, entry standard, cross-reference model and editorial direction. The role is editorial, not a blanket claim of sole authorship for every entry.

The Founding Editor decides what enters the corpus, what is withheld, how contested material is framed, when corrections are required, and when a release is ready. Named contributors and reviewers receive role-specific credit under the contributor policy.

Corpus design

The Encyclopedia is organised around seven entry types: concept, instrument, technology, case, actor, institution and legal authority. The master lemma list was built before full production, then expanded through gap reviews. Each entry has a canonical title, stable slug, type, rank, length band, verification status, related entries and sources.

Economic statecraft is the umbrella category. Entries distinguish inducement, exchange, integration, resilience, denial, coercion, economic warfare and order-building. Economic warfare is retained as a high-intensity mode, not treated as a synonym for the field as a whole.

Entries lead with a definition. They then explain mechanism, historical or institutional context, strategic significance, contestation, and connections to the rest of the field. Anchor entries carry more analytical weight and require deeper review than ordinary entries.

Evidence hierarchy

Editors and reviewers should prefer evidence in this order:

1. Primary law, regulation, treaty text, official data, government record, corporate filing, court decision, or contemporaneous archival source.
2. Peer-reviewed scholarship and books from established academic presses.
3. High-quality institutional research with transparent sourcing.
4. Reputable journalism for current events or facts unavailable in primary form.
5. Reference works and tertiary summaries for orientation only.

A tertiary source may identify a lead. It should not carry a contested, reputationally damaging, or analytically central claim where a primary or stronger secondary source is available.

Editorial workflow

Research leads and initial drafts are treated as provisional text, not evidence. A citation is never accepted without locating and checking the underlying source.

The internal production status 'verified' records completion of the project's verification workflow. It does not mean that every entry has received independent peer review. Public pages must distinguish editorial verification, independent review, and legal review as separate statuses.

Entry workflow

1. Select the lemma and assign its type, rank, scope, and length band.
2. Collect sources and identify the strongest authority for the definition and core claims.
3. Draft the entry to the entry standard, including contestation and related entries.
4. Check names, dates, quantities, quotations, legal authorities, and source fidelity.
5. Resolve cross-links and run corpus-wide terminology and attribution checks.
6. Review higher-risk entries for living persons, allegations, contested territorial claims, operational misuse, and legal exposure.
7. Record review status, reviewer, date, version, and material corrections.
8. Publish only when the applicable release gates pass.

Verification labels

• Editorially checked: passed the internal source and consistency workflow.
• Independently reviewed: assessed by a named or confidential external reviewer under the reviewer brief.
• Legally reviewed: assessed by qualified counsel for the specified release and jurisdiction.
• Current-event watch: contains facts likely to change and has a scheduled review date.
• Withheld: not published because a core claim remains unverified or the risk cannot be responsibly managed.

No page may display a stronger label than the review record supports. 'Peer reviewed' is reserved for a documented peer-review process and may not describe the corpus merely because experts have commented on selected entries.

Contestation

The Encyclopedia states material disputes as disputes. It separates description from prescription, and evidence from the Founding Editor's original analytical frameworks. Where terminology varies across disciplines or jurisdictions, the entry identifies the competing usage and explains the editorial choice.

Review cadence

Fast-moving entries should be reviewed at least quarterly. Stable historical and conceptual entries should be reviewed annually or when a correction is submitted. A frozen annual edition preserves the state of the corpus for citation, while the website remains the current edition.