Relaunching Völkerrechtsblog 2016

Völkerrechtsblog launches into the year 2016 – our third year! – with a new website, design and logo, and with new content and new services for the international law community. We have moved to a new domain, voelkerrechtsblog.org, and the site has been redesigned to make it more accessible and easier to navigate. The start page has a new look, posts can now be illustrated with images, and boxes link directly to symposia and other content. We are also introducing new content categories, namely posts on “current developments” to provide you with up-to-date international law news. In 2016, we also expand our cooperation with renowned law journals. We will discuss selected articles from the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Nordic Journal of International Law, the Archiv des Völkerrechts and SZIER. In addition, our popular service section received a makeover and now offers a search function, and you can switch between an event calendar view and the old list view.

Another novelty is our “Community” section, which gives you access to various international law networks and exchange platforms. In addition to the established Arbeitskreis junger VölkerrechtlerInnen, we host two new initiatives: The new “Teaching” section is addressed to all those engaging with international law in the classroom. It will enable faculty to exchange experiences, syllabi, and other materials, and students to inform themselves about international law teaching offers. Over time, this new section is supposed to become a broader gateway for international law teaching in the German-speaking world in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationales Recht, which is hosting a kick-off conference in March 2016. Our second new offer is the “Blogosphere Ticker”: For now, the ticker collects posts from other international law blogs, and we are working on a function that will allow you to subscribe to the ticker with keywords your are interested in. With this new meta-feature, Völkerrechtsblog helps you to keep track of the ever growing legal blogosphere.

We hope you enjoy our new website and we welcome your feedback via the comment function below or via e-mail, as we keep improving the new site. Most importantly, we are looking forward to your contributions to the new Völkerrechtsblog. In particular, we are looking for thematic “reporters” that will contribute updates to our new “current developments” category. You will find contact details, the various categories of posts which we publish, and our new directions for authors under “Writing for the Blog”. On that same page, you will also find our image guidelines and our new Creative Commons licensing policy.

In the meantime, we are also working with the Staatsbibliothek Berlin to archive all posts from our site and to make them citable by means of a unique “Digital Object Identifier” (DOI) number. New posts will soon be covered by this arrangement, and old ones will be added over time as we migrate them from the old website. The old domain, voelkerrechtsblog.com, will redirect to this new site. There is also a new English gateway for non-German speakers at internationallawblog.org, which redirects here to our main page.

Last but not least, we gratefully acknowledge the support of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, which has made the relaunch possible with funds from the Leibniz prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as all our other partners and sponsors.

Michael Riegner  for the Völkerrechtsblog team

Cite as: Michael Riegner, “Relaunching Völkerrechtsblog 2016 : Our platform starts into its third year with a new face and new features”, Völkerrechtsblog,  14 January 2016, doi: 10.17176/20171005-170442.