Around the beginning of World War II, the Jewish-German thinker Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem: "“Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.” Benjamin was trying to encourage his friend that, no matter how hopeless or uncertain the times seemed to be, publication was a gesture against that darkness, an implicit statement that it was possible to make a difference, "no matter how uncertain the future."
There are many colleagues who think today we also live in dark times and under radical uncertainty about the future. But there are some who believe we are publishing too much, at least in international law. This is the view of Cambridge professor Sarah Nouwen, recently appointed co-editor in chief of the European Journal of International Law, surely among the leading publications in our field. Recently, Joseph Weiler, the other co-editor, interviewed Nouwen, who said:
There’s more and more and more and I think far too much is published…so much is out there…one cannot even begin to research everything that’s being written on a topic… we should have slow writing and slow publishing. We buy into a culture of wanting to be seen everywhere…to publish everywhere.
To be precise, Nouwen made this claim about every academic discipline not just international law. Certainly, making a judgment about every academic discipline is way beyond my pay grade. So I'll stick to international law, where like other followers of this blog, I try to read widely and, where possible, deeply. (I proposed to Nouwen we debate her proposition at some appropriate forum but she declined-understandably-citing the burden of her new responsibilities with EJIL and other heavy commitments).
Let me state several reasons for celebrating the explosion of publications in international law.
- The expansion is rightly a reflection of the recognition that there are many many regimes/sub-fields that are real international law, not just the use of force, the UN Charter, border disputes and so on that are worthy of sustained scholarly attention. This is a point that international economic law folks can surely appreciate. Was the world a better place when we had, basically, Bob Hudec,John Jackson with maybe an Eric Stein or Jacques Bourgeois or three? This is not a judgment about the merits of these brave souls who dared to think that trade was a worthy subject of serious scholarly writing. In many ways, the vast expansion of scholarship on trade, investment, and finance in international law is a tribute to their original vision.
- The expansion of publication has reflected an expansion of voices: developing-world voices, indigenous voices, women's voices, environmentalist and animal welfare voices, and so on. (Nouwen herself claims to be concerned about women's voices, yet it is hard to say that returning to a more restrictive view of publication would be a positive for gender representation).
- By "slow writing" and "slow publishing" we international law scholars cannot reverse the tremendous acceleration of existence in these times, the digital revolution and so on. We can only succeed in becoming a (perhaps noble) anachronism, There are reasons to respond to tweets that reframe policy and attitudes on matters like tariffs, China, trade and national security by scholarly analysis not just other tweets. Responding slowly may make a statement for posterity but it ill serves our responsibilities to our students, to the political community, and to the world. I therefore welcome the fast publishing of recent e books that have addressed the crisis of the WTO dispute system, and trade war with China, for instance.
- The enemies of international law would like to reinforce their image of us as an effete clique removed from reality, a small self-admiration society fantasizing about a world where international lawyers not power politics determine the outcomes. The more we publish, the more places we publish, the more we plausibly claim a legitimate place in the public world.
- "Scribere est agere," to write is to act, goes the famous Latin maxim. But this is only true where the writing is communicated. We scholars are generally overall reticent to imagine that what we write is really seen out there in the world-or that, if it is, that's it is largely because of the prestige of our institutional affiliation or of the publication venue. But scholarly writing is a message in a bottle-and the bottle more often than we think gets found by someone in some position to learn from and give real world impact to that missive. And usually, that far away treasure-hunter being indifferent to the artificial hierarchies of the academic world, it is the message that will concern them, not the stamps of elite approval on it. I always enjoy hearing (usually long after the fact) how something I have published in a completely unknown or un-ranked outlet (even a blog!) provoked a debate in the cabinet of some government or among the high officials of an international organization- people typically indifferent to matters such as scholarly pecking-order.
- This circles back to Benjamin's basic point to Scholem. Publication is an affirmation that the future is open, and that we, however powerless we may feel in a world where so many forces and constraints seem to be against us, might make a difference, that our message is important. We might worry that our manuscript is banal, descriptive-but it might just have the specialized information that a policymaker in a poor country needs to advance her country's interests in a complex process of global governance, for example. So always err on the side of publication-you respect yourself, and your belief that others might find value in what matters to you is a respect for the public world of thought and action; or, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it public communication through writing is not just the entitlement but also the duty of a scholar.
