Call for Blogs: Old Doctrines, New Battles - Völkerrechtsblog Symposium on the Rules-Based International Order in Latin America and the Caribbean [English or Spanish; No Fee]

Völkerrechtsblog is an open-access academic blog on public international law and international legal thought. It is inviting contributions for an online blog symposium titled Old Doctrines, New Battles - The Future of the Rules-Based International Order in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The call opens from the observation that Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are once again a central site of contestation over the meaning, application and future of some of public international law's most fundamental principles. Recent debates over United States conduct towards Venezuela, Colombia's changing regional role amid its ongoing armed conflict, the international reception of governance models such as El Salvador's, and the continuing impact of the US embargo and sanctions on Cuba raise questions that go well beyond individual cases.

The organisers state that these developments touch on structural issues of sovereignty, intervention, democratic erosion, and the capacity or limits of international law to engage meaningfully with informal, indirect or politically legitimised forms of external influence. The symposium seeks contributions that situate regional developments within wider debates on sovereignty, intervention, democratic governance and the international legal order, rather than pieces confined to isolated or case-specific issues.

Völkerrechtsblog invites scholars and practitioners to reflect, among others, on the following strands:

• Interventions and Interferences: contemporary forms of intervention and external influence in LAC, including the role of foreign states, private actors, transnational criminal organisations and other non-state actors. Historical perspectives, for example Guatemala or other case studies, are also welcome to illustrate structural limitations of the OAS and the UN and to assess whether those limitations continue to shape the lack of effective responses to interventions today.
• Safeguarding Human Rights, Democracy and Realizing Self-Determination: the potential of international law to promote internal and external self-determination and racial justice and to safeguard democracy, read against the region's history of colonial domination, resistance and state-building, and against decolonial scholarship emerging from the region that challenges universalist readings of a Eurocentric international law.
• Contestation of the Rules-Based Order: the current state of a rules-based order that increasingly appears threatened or diminished, including rules that originally emerged as forms of resistance in South and Central America such as the principle of non-intervention crystallised in UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 (XXV), the Calvo Doctrine and the Drago Doctrine.
• Emergency Powers, States of Exception, and Democratic Governance: the normalisation of emergency measures, the concentration of executive authority, the relationship between constitutional and international constraints on emergency powers, and the role of international human rights law in addressing prolonged, recurring or informal states of exception.

The organisers particularly encourage contributions that engage with the broader legal and structural questions underpinning these developments, and that connect regional dynamics to core concepts, doctrines and institutions of public international law.

The call is addressed to scholars and practitioners. It sets no nationality, citizenship, institutional or jurisdictional restriction, so researchers, academics, doctoral candidates and practitioners based anywhere, including India, may submit.

Submissions must mention the affiliation of the authors. Völkerrechtsblog's directions for authors refer throughout to "(the) author(s)", so co-authored contributions are accepted.

The blog states that it welcomes posts from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including unconventional and critical perspectives on international law, and that recentness of the topic is not the decisive publication criterion.

• Length: contributions of approximately 1,500 words. Under the blog's general directions for authors, text posts should be around 1,500 words, with a minimum of 1,000 and a maximum of 2,000 words.
• Language: English or Spanish for this symposium.
• Format: posts must follow Völkerrechtsblog's directions for authors, which ask for a main title and sub-title in Chicago-style capitalisation, a clear argument stated in the opening paragraph, and sections with headings.
• References: hyperlinks rather than footnotes, anchored on an active word or a phrase of three to five words rather than on a whole sentence.
• Illustration and biography: if a post is accepted, the author is invited to suggest a licence-free landscape image and to supply a one to two sentence biography.
• Parallel submissions: the blog strongly prefers exclusive submissions. If a post is being submitted to other blogs in parallel, this must be stated explicitly in the first email.

Posts are assigned to a member of the Editorial Team, who becomes the author's main contact point between submission and publication. Text posts go through a double-blind peer review process and, if recommended for publication, are then edited by the assigned editor. Völkerrechtsblog notes that this procedure can take a while.

All posts published on Völkerrechtsblog appear under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. The blog is committed to good academic practice as laid down in the DFG Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice and does not accept plagiarism in any form. Use of generative AI is not prohibited if it follows the DFG Executive Committee's statement on generative models, and AI-generated images are not accepted for post illustration.

On a duly justified request, such as personal safety, a post can be published anonymously in line with the relevant COPE guidance.

Free. The call states no submission charge, processing fee or publication fee. Völkerrechtsblog is an open-access blog and its content is published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.

Send the contribution by email to symposium-americas@voelkerrechtsblog.org.

• Mention 'Call for Contributions - Symposium' in the subject line.
• State the affiliation of the author or authors in the email.
• Flag it in the same email if the post is also under consideration elsewhere.

Deadline for the submission of blog posts: 7 September 2026.