I Started a Twitch Channel – A What Channel?

Twitch is a live-streaming platform launched in 2011 to cater to the growing supply of amateur and professional gamers playing videogames for an audience. Twitch allows the user to stream, simultaneously, footage of themselves and of their videogame at the same time, which meant that gamers could build entire communities around a shared activity. This rapidly grew into much more than just gaming, though. Twitch channels have now built communities around activities like dancing, arts and crafts, singing and karaoke, etc. In fact, one of the fastest growing categories – Just Chatting – is quite literally just that: people chatting with a streamer about any particular topic they want. So, I thought, why not chat about international law?

The Internet has been very good to international law. In the early 2000s, when I was in law school, international law blogs rapidly exploded into the scene. I still remember the conversations in comment sections about “whether we should take blog posts seriously or not”. Now, two decades later, blogs have pretty much become part of the publication process. You test your ideas in blog format, then you expand them, workshop them, and then finally publish them.

Then came, of course, Twitter, which allowed us to meet and reach out to our specific professional communities (#AcademicTwitter; #Twitterstorians; etc.). And despite repeated attempts to finding a better platform for this kind of engagement, it seems like it still serves a useful function, despite its many, many problems.

The latest development, I would say, is podcasts, which allowed us to engage in long-form conversations about our research and scholarship. Podcasts provide a valuable service to our community, allowing us to expand and flesh out our arguments in more immediate ways than conferences and workshops allow.

All of these are amazing landmarks in the history of international law’s internet life. And yet, one common denominator in all of this is that they are all inward-looking. Sure, Twitter is great for people to follow academics to get specialised information about current events or for journalists to find people to interview, but at the end of the day, its main contribution has been the creation of “#AcademicTwitter”. It has allowed us to find ourselves and strengthen the so-called “Invisible College”. The fact that so many in our community thought that they could simply move academia to other platforms in the wake of Elon Musk’s purchase proves this. For many in our online community, Academia could just “move out” of Twitter because Twitter is where Academia engages with itself, not with the broader world.

The inward-looking online presence of international law academia (of academia as a whole, perhaps) is very Ivory-Tower-y. We rarely if ever engage with the broader public and their concerns about the world.

My online experience has been relatively different. I used to engage with politics online several years before I joined academia. This meant that my Twitter following has never been exclusively academic. As many of you have told me, sometimes chatting with me is risking an avalanche of Peruvian trolls coming your way (I am sorry!). What this experience showed me, is that international law and international relations matter to our societies. Thousands (if not millions) of people want to know. They have questions and are looking for answers. And if we are not there to provide these answers, they will find them elsewhere.

When the ICJ issued its Advisory Opinion on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory, I asked my Twitter followers if they had any questions about it. I received the mind-blowing amount of 224 questions in total. Of course it was impossible to answer them all one by one. Many in the comments then started to suggest I do a “live” about it. I literally had no idea how to do that. But it felt only fair that I try.    

This is where Twitch came in. It allowed me to chat, for nearly 2 hours, with 249 people with questions. Judging by the reception I’ve received from followers, the stream was a success. Since it’s live premiere on Sunday, the video has been watched 800 times. My hope is that just like blogs, Twitter and podcasts, eventually Twitch channels can become a regular occurrence for international lawyers looking to engage with an audience interested in international law. The main difference, though, is that Twitch will not be inward-looking, but outward-looking. It will get us off the Ivory Tower, out of the Invisible College, and allow us to talk about our research with a curious and engaging community of Twitchers.

If you want to see my Twitch Channel, you can access it here. Twitch streams stay online for 7 days, after which I will upload them to YouTube, where people can watch them long-term. I am embedding the first Stream below. If you want to catch a live one, I will be doing this regularly, usually on Sundays. So, stay tuned!