Opening Access, Closing the Knowledge Gap? – International Legal Scholarship going online

Völkerrechtsblog’s hybrid conference “Opening Access, Closing the Knowledge Gap – International Legal Scholarship going online” aimed to expand the notion of ‘open access’ from a mere standard of publication to the continuous and active undertaking of ‘opening access’ in a closed international legal scholarship and in the teaching of international law. Because of their low-threshold online accessibility, international law blogs hold considerable potential to close the gap between the interested public or other disciplines and the scholarly discourse. They also offer more space for critical approaches and experimental pieces than established journals and, especially when located in the Global South, can facilitate the creation of independent academic identities distinct from dominant epistemologies. The crucial question, however, is how power imbalances and structural barriers, affecting academics who do not reflect the idealized concept of the ‘typical’ international legal scholar, transcend the format of publication. This report calls upon individuals, publishers and editors to decolonize their understanding of knowledge and fight existing mechanisms of exclusion such as epistemic violence and gatekeeping in international legal scholarship, while keeping in mind that accessibility looks different for everyone.