Directions for Authors

A Word on Content and Style

We welcome posts from a variety of (disciplinary) perspectives including unconventional and critical perspectives on international law. With our main aim to foster scholarly debate, recentness of the topic is not the decisive publication criterion. While posts focusing on current topics and questions are always welcome, we are equally interested in contributions dealing with more theoretical and foundational questions.

Blog posts are shorter, more informal and freer in style than traditional journal articles (see for the formal requirements below). They are also more argumentative and a good format to test new ideas and work in progress. Given the shortness of the blog format, we ask our authors to avoid long and general introductions and get straight into the argument. Usually, it is helpful to make clear in the first paragraph what the post is about, i.e., what the argument/idea/tested hypothesis is.

To catch the reader’s attention, we invite authors to choose a clear and/or catchy title. Articles on Völkerrechtsblog use a main title/sub-title format. Use the sub-title for important information on the issue dealt with in the post (e.g., name of court decision or a short description of your thesis); be creative and catchy with the short(!) main title.

 

Posts That Are Not Texts

While we mostly publish texts, we do encourage submissions that are of a more visual nature (e.g., photographs, works of art, video material, audio formats, graphics, animations), as long as they manifest a clear link to international law and international legal thought. Please get in touch with us to discuss your ideas. We will assess such submissions on a case-by-case basis.

Please still adhere to the formalities detailed below as regards the main title and sub-title, post illustration, and author’s profile.

 

Formalities

Submit your post to Völkerrechtsblog’s Managing Editors at editorial-team@voelkerrechtsblog.org.

All posts on Völkerrechtsblog are published under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0. This means that, once your post submission is published on our site, it becomes subject to that license.

Unless stated otherwise, we do not prohibit the use of generative AI if it follows the guidelines laid out in the Statement by the Executive Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) on the Influence of Generative Models of Text and Image Creation on Science and the Humanities and on the DFG’s Funding Activities.

Posts are generally accepted in English, German, or French. For text posts, there is no preferred variety of English spelling (e.g., British or American), but the spelling should be consistent. If you have a post in another language, please feel free to submit it anyway—however, we cannot guarantee editing and peer review capacity in other languages and may have to reject your post on that basis. If appropriate to the subject, you can also send us two language versions of a post, to be published jointly.

Text posts should be around 1500 words, with a minimum of 1000 and a maximum of 2000 words. We may ask you to shorten your submission accordingly. In exceptional and duly justified circumstances, we may allow for a longer text posts to be split and published in two parts.

Texts should be clear in style and structure. Usually, sections with headings are helpful.

We use hyperlinks rather than footnotes for references. Hyperlinks should not be on an entire sentence, but ideally on the active word or a phrase of three to maximum five words.

For titles, subtitles, and headings, we use the so-called Chicago style:

• Capitalize the first and the last word.
• Capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions.
• Lowercase articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions.
• Lowercase the ‘to’ in an infinitive (e.g., “I Want to Play Guitar”).
• If unsure, follow this link, click on the Chicago tab, and paste the title in for automatic capitalization.

Author’s Profile and Picture

Each post is accompanied by a picture of and some basic information about the author. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide us with a short (1-2 sentences) biography that details your current occupation and, if relevant, your background. We reserve the right to shorten lengthy biographical texts. You will also be invited to provide links to your social media presence. If you send us your LinkedIn and/or BlueSky profiles, we will tag you when we share your post on those platforms.

If you provide a picture of yourself, please make sure it is license-free or subject to a license that allows for use on our website that is unrestricted (see below). Pictures of you should ideally be in black and white.

Upon your request in duly justified circumstances, such as personal safety, your post can be published anonymously in line with the relevant COPE guidance.

Post Illustration / ‘Hero’ Image

Every post is illustrated by a picture. If your post submission is accepted for publication, we will invite you to suggest an image to accompany and illustrate it. We reserve the right to choose an image other than the one you suggest.

Any type of picture—e.g., photographs, drawings, renderings—can in principle be acceptable. If appropriate, a moving picture (video) that has a very short duration may be used. Pictures must be in horizontal (landscape) format, ideally in a 3:2 ratio.

If you suggest an image, please provide a hyperlink to the image’s source rather than only sending the image itself as an attachment. An exception is made when you yourself are the rights-holder or the rights-holder gave you individual and express permission for use on our website (e.g., a photo taken by you or your friend at a demonstration). In that case, please still specify who the rights-holder is.

Pictures must be license-free or subject to a license that allows for use on our website that is unrestricted (not time-limited, no prohibition on front page use, commercial use allowed, modifications and adaptations to the picture allowed, etc.). Licenses that require attribution and that adaptations be shared only under the same terms as the original are acceptable. Typical examples of licenses we can accept are many Creative Commons licenses (e.g. the popular CC BY-SA 4.0 that we use for our posts) or the Unsplash license. We recommend using pictures from Unsplash (not Unsplash+) or from Flickr and Wikimedia Commons under the condition that their licenses meet the aforementioned criteria.

Please do not purchase a license for a picture you wish to suggest without first checking with us whether the license can be used for publication on our website. We cannot guarantee use of the picture you suggest, although of course we will take your wishes and thoughts into consideration.

We do not accept AI-generated images for the purposes of post illustration.

 

Parallel Submissions

Please note that we strongly prefer exclusive submissions. If you are submitting a text post to several blogs in parallel, please indicate this explicitly in your first email to us. Cross-posting may be a possibility under specific circumstances but is not guaranteed.

 

Procedure

Posts are assigned to a member of the Editorial Team, who will be your main contact point between submission and publication. Text posts go through a double-blind peer review process and, if recommended for publication, then are edited by the assigned member of the Editorial Team. This procedure can take a while.

For contributions on current developments, we do our best to ensure a swift process. Please mention in your email if your submission concerns a current development.

 

Good Academic Practice

Völkerrechtsblog is committed to good academic practice. By submitting a contribution to Völkerrechtsblog, (the) author(s) commit(s) to comply with applicable law and good academic practice as laid down in the DFG “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice”.

We do not accept any form of plagiarism understood as unjustified appropriation of others’ research achievements without justification (see in more detail here section II item 2). Instead of footnotes, links serve for referencing.

Völkerrechtsblog does not publish purely descriptive conference reports, but accepts posts that make their own original contribution to debates conducted at academic events. Where a post is based on or inspired by conferences or oral presentations, authors must make this transparent in the post and take special care to properly attribute unpublished original ideas to their true authors.

By submitting a manuscript to Völkerrechtsblog, the author(s) consent(s) to a check of their manuscript with a plagiarism detection software. Should any suspicion of plagiarism arise, the Editorial Team will undertake an investigation in line with the COPE guidance on cases of suspected plagiarism. We reserve the right to report detected severe cases of plagiarism to the author’s academic institution.

 

Visibility

Völkerrechtsblog is committed to open, transparent, and appreciative interaction within academia. In this spirit, Völkerrechtsblog strives to give visibility to supportive and collaborative work in the run-up to publication. We strongly encourage authors to acknowledge the contribution of any person to the research or drafting process (especially early-career researchers or student assistants) at the end of their blogpost.

 

Comment Policy

We very much welcome your engagement with posts via the comment function. To do so, write your text in the comment section and submit the comment. Please note that comments are not published instantly but are subject to a moderation procedure by the Editorial Team. We expect comments to engage with the arguments of the corresponding blog post, free of ad hominem remarks. We reserve the right to withhold the publication of abusive or defamatory comments or comments that constitute hate speech. These guidelines will also be applied to moderate discussions on our social media pages.