LETTER FROM THE EDITORS.

The mandate of the Journal of International Affairs is to provide a forum for exploring issues and offering innovative solutions to problems of global concern. This guiding principle has led the Journal to focus on a vast array of topics, and our archive is a compendium of the most urgent topics of the time, captured in our volumes dating back nearly three-quarters of a century.

Our latest issue focuses on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), which is one the most pressing issues facing our generation because the next phase of global economic transformation is happening now. The integration of automated processes and digital innovation with physical systems of production promises to fundamentally change how humans all over the world live their lives. Indeed, its impacts are already being felt in industries as varied as agriculture, manufacturing, and the services sector. But the relevance of 4IR to international affairs is not only in how it will change the nature of work. It is also in the social, political, and economic consequences 4IR engenders.

These changes and their consequences provide the touchstones for this issue's contributors. Professor Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) provides a foreword to the issue, outlining his vision of what the Fourth Industrial Revolution entails, three years after introducing the term itself into popular use. Professor Schwab's foreword is accompanied by a primer on 4IR by WEF's Thomas Philbeck and Nicholas Davis. Together, these high-level perspectives ground our understanding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by laying out theoretical parameters our contributors explore.

From the International Labor Organization, Director-General Guy Ryder writes about the challenges of valuing work as the labor market changes, which is followed by an examination of the gig economy by Alex De Ruyter, director of the Center for Brexit Studies at Birmingham City University, Martyn Brown, and John Burgess. An interview with Stefa-no Scarpetta of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development focuses on how labor resilience might be improved in the face of the changing nature of work, and Federica Saliola and Simeon Djankov from the World Bank Group expand on the latest World Development Report and provide robust analysis of the effect of technology on work and consider how governments could respond.

Our contributors also focus not just on the broad social impacts of 4IR, but also its...