Directions for Authors

A word on content and style

We welcome posts from a variety of 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. Völkerrechtsblog uses headings and subheadings. Use the subheading for important information on the issue dealt with in the post (e.g. name of court decision); be creative with regard to the (short) main heading!

Formal requirements

• Blog posts are received at editorial-team@voelkerrechtsblog.org.
• Submissions can be in English, German, or French.
• Blog contributions should be around 1000 words, we happily accept texts with up to 1500 words.
• Please submit your text in word format.
• The text should be clear in style and structure. Usually, sections with sub-titles are helpful.
• Please use hyperlinks rather than footnotes for references. (There might be well-founded exceptions to that.)
• Please send us your picture which must be royalty-free, e.g. free for us to use. Please also provide us with a brief paragraph on your current institution and occupation (max. two sentences) and your social media profiles, should you wish to be tagged on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram.
• We are happy to publish an image alongside your text. Images from online sources can only be used if the license permits the publication on the blog. This could be e.g. a Creative Commons license like CC-BY-SA. Please submit this information (source, name of photographer, license details).
• All articles on Völkerrechtsblog are published under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0.

Parallel submissions

Please note that we strongly prefer exclusive submissions. However, if you are submitting a text to several blogs in parallel, please indicate this explicitly in your first email to us. Cross-posting may be a possibility under specific circumstances.

Procedure

Texts go through an editing process, which usually includes a double-blind peer-review. Despite this thorough process, the time it takes from submission to publication is generally short. Especially 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.

Submissions others than articles

While we mostly publish texts, we do encourage submissions that are of a more visual nature. These can consist of photographs, works of art, video material, 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.

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 guidelines in cases of suspected plagiarism. We reserve the right to report detected severe cases of plagiarism to the author’s academic institution.

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 and 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.