Call for Papers

A New Section in the Leiden Journal of International Law

Rolling Symposium

The Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) has long served as a forum for critical voices that speak on the theory and practice of international law. As the landscape of global governance becomes increasingly complex, the boundaries between the ‘international’ and the ‘local’—insofar as they were ever stable—are increasingly blurred. We are convinced that to understand what international law does in the world, we must study how it is negotiated, resisted, domesticated, and vernacularised in specific social, cultural, and political arenas. This requires widening the study of international norm production beyond traditional sites of international law-making to include the many locations where norms emerge and become meaningful.

In recognition of this reality, LJIL is launching a New Section entitled ‘International Law and Society’. The section seeks to de-center the traditional capitals of international law and pluralise our understanding of how global norms operate in particular contexts. The core idea is that we can learn something about the ‘global’ from the ‘local’. We are open to interdisciplinary work from a range of vantage points including sociology, anthropology, feminist and queer studies, postcolonialism, political economy, history and critical legal studies.

The new section will kick off with a rolling Symposium, aiming to capture the bidirectional dynamics of legal ordering: how local laws, social movements, and domestic courts actively shape international law, and conversely, how international legal regimes restructure local realities and domestic legal systems. We recognize that the process of norm dissemination between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ is frequently shaped by power asymmetries and welcome scholarship that interrogates the material impacts of global inequalities in international law-making on marginalised communities and domestic ecosystems. This can include contributions that look beyond the state, and take seriously the worldmaking projects of communities—from Palestine to Western Sahara to Kashmir—whose aspirations for freedom remain unfulfilled. We invite scholars to treat local context not merely as a passive recipient of global norms, but as a dynamic site of global legal production.

Thematic Focus and Contributions

We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodologically innovative submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following thematic inquiries:

• The vernacularisation of international law in specific contexts
• Rival understandings of international law from different ‘local’ vantage points
• Domestic courts, civil society, corporations, indigenous peoples, associations, sport federations, individuals and other actors engaged in international norm production and norm implementation
• Global crises and localised legal responses; or local crises and globalised legal responses
• The effects of structural inequalities in the international legal order on specific localities
• The teachings of international law across various contexts
• Local rejections of international law
• Subaltern and counter-hegemonic practices of international law in specific contexts
• The search for local alternatives to international law
• Regional specificities of international law

Deadlines and logistics

• Submission of Abstracts (between 200-400 words): 10 January 2027
• Submission of Final Papers: approx. 15 July 2027
• Accepted abstracts will be notified by 10 February 2027 
• Authors can submit theirs abstracts here: https://forms.gle/ZQt91TTGZCfD...

If you have any question, please reach out to the section editors at ljilandsociety@gmail.com

Editors and Convenors: Yilin Wang (University of Macao), Rishabh Bajoria (University of Cambridge), Lena Holzer (University of Cambridge)

We look forward to receiving your abstracts.