As a brat summer is slowly giving its spot to a very demure fall and as our mid-year break has officially ended, we are writing to welcome you back to Völkerrechtsblog’s regular flow, to spread the news about some changes that our team has undergone, and to share with you our plans for the upcoming months.
Following our July editorial team meeting, the three of us have been elected as Völkerrechtsblog’s new Editors-in-Chief. We are humbled to have been entrusted with this position by our colleagues and we are committed to upholding the high standards set by our predecessors.
During their term, Isabel Lischewski, Sué González Hauck, and Meike Krakau took the initiative to begin restructuring our editorial team: Rishiti Choudaha, Khaled El Mahmoud, and Polina Kulish have joined Maximilian Beyer and Miriam Nomanni as Managing Editors of the blog – the colleagues entrusted with the blog’s day-to-day operations, i.e. accepting submissions, organizing the editing and peer review process, and scheduling publication.
Our predecessors have also paved the way for the upcoming celebration of Völkerrechtsblog’s ten-year anniversary (we look forward to sharing more information on this soon). And, maybe most importantly, they relentlessly offered their wisdom and guidance beyond the everyday life of the blog. Their dedication, vision, and tireless work have been instrumental in shaping the voice and direction of our blog and for all these reasons we are deeply grateful!
Squaring the Circle or Circling through the Square?
With this change in leadership, we have also assumed the responsibility of what sometimes feels like squaring the proverbial circle: an exercise in which we are often forced to compromise between ensuring quality via peer review and opening access and diversity of viewpoints; between offering alternatives to the legal academic publishing landscape and remaining part of the conversation; between the joy of working in a team of committed volunteers and avoiding exploitation and playing into the logics of intrinsically motivated (young) scholars; between being an institution founded and based in Germany and being a credible forum for voices on the war in Gaza. All these are challenges which are being felt more and more urgently against the backdrop of these historic times.
In an effort not to become frustrated with being caught in what feels more and more like the constraints of a square, we are committed to continuing and expanding new formats. We hope to achieve this by creating (a) new space(s), ‘circling through the square’, as we trace and make visible the beauty and comfort of “thinking together” in the team – but also, and most importantly, together with all of you. With new spaces such as our open-ended review format reflectiÖns, we have had the privilege of giving space to an exchange of thoughts on dis:order in international law. With this and many more projects, such as the person behind the academic interview series and our ‘what we read during the break’ series, we continue to work through the rigidness, symmetry, limitedness and intransigency of the square that international legal scholarship too often still is.
Building a Sustainable Team
New formats are not the only thing we hope to progress at the blog. While we are very happy with the lovely editorial team we currently have, Völkerrechtsblog’s volunteer nature has shown its downside in the past few months: we are spread a bit too thinly. None of us have more than a few hours a week to invest into the blog’s operations, and this has been more and more evident in recent times. Contributors will know the feeling of the all-too-frequent long waits for their submissions to be initially accepted, for a responsible editor to be selected, for peer review and (sometimes multiple rounds) of editing, and for publication. While we like to consider ourselves a ‘slow blog’, we may have been stretching that notion a bit too far lately. It’s not that we don’t want to publish posts – simply put, there too few of us (especially in certain areas of expertise).
Therefore, we are looking into sustainable ways of expanding our editorial team and building a ‘future generation’ of Völkerrechtsblog editors. Many of Völkerrechtsblog’s editors have been with us for more than five years, and we hope to find new colleagues interested in a long-term commitment. In this sense, you can expect to see our team grow again sooner or later, and we hope that this growth will allow the blog to celebrate more decades of scholarly discussions on international law, international legal thought and potentially even beyond these topics.
Another factor in expanding the team is facing the reality that – due largely to Völkerrechtsblog’s roots in German(-speaking), institutional academia – the team’s backgrounds are relatively homogenous: majority white, majority based in Central and Western Europe, and majority based in academic institutions. In line with the wish to create more diverse formats and spaces outside of the proverbial square, we want to put effort into welcoming a larger number of new team members that reflect this. To that effect, we would like to prioritize our team becoming progressively less German(-speaking), less white, and less centered in the Global North.
We are working on the specifics of a call for applications, which we plan to publish in the new year. More updates on this to follow!
Onwards, Together
At the risk of beating a dead cliché, we are deeply grateful to Völkerrechtsblog’s readers and authors alike for your continued support over past ten years. We want to make sure the blog stays on the right track of providing a home for everyone, a home of different viewpoints to meet and engage with each other openly and a home for different forms of thinking together. In case we have not succeeded in providing such a home for everyone to date, we want to start now. However, this is not something we will be able to build on our own. We depend greatly on you. Not only to submit your contributions and project ideas, to engage with the content we publish, but also on you challenging our work and our decisions and point us in the right direction when necessary. When we say that our home is your home, we mean it. So, please help us make Völkerrechtsblog the kind of home you want it to be! We are happy to receive any suggestions, criticism, or other message you may want to share with us in the comment section or by e-mail.
Here’s to starting off a new period together – onwards, together!
