06 Nov Blogging From the Periphery to the Bibliography: Welcoming Jinan Bastaki
[While members of the Opinio Juris team sighted this post before publication, the views expressed are my own.]
On 3 November 2026, the UN General Assembly and Security Council elected Dapo Akande to the International Court of Justice. While many aspects of his profile earned this honour, I note that he was a founding editor of EJIL:Talk! Like Opinio Juris, Völkerrechtsblog, and Just Security, EJIL:Talk! is part of a widening space for the cultivation of international legal scholarship, one that has shaped how international lawyers argue as much as any journal. Akande’s election is, foremost, a professional achievement, yet it also marks how far legal blogging has travelled.
When Opinio Juris launched a generation ago, the blog post was a marginal genre of scholarship, read widely, cited sparingly, and dismissed swiftly by university promotion panels. Today’s dynamic could not be more different — save for the promotion panels! — with posts appearing within days of a judgment or an armed attack. Rigour combined with dynamism enables blogs to influence the public narrative around the event, as well as the scholarly debate that follows in journals a year or two later.
The ICJ’s own library corroborates this evolution. The latest iterations of the its bibliography highlight the rising importance of the blog post in the body of international legal scholarship, sitting alongside reputed monographs and articles. Bibliography No. 63 was no exception, listing, for example, a cluster of posts on the proceedings pertaining to Palestine. The Statute imposes no criterion on format for “the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations”, and blogs have proven to be potent venues via which these teachings can reach both the Court and the academy. Alongside the Court’s bibliographies, we find references to blogs in the submissions of legal teams appearing before a range of tribunals, with rapid-response commentary also guiding the arguments counsel make.
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For those of us who edit blogs, the effects are palpable. In day-to-day activities, editors make a plethora of decisions about arguments, symposia, and narratives that determine what the discipline has at hand. Legal advisers and doctoral candidates alike look to blogs for guidance, even inspiration, on contested questions across an array of topics. Who edits a blog therefore bears upon the sources of international law, perhaps disproportionately so. The stakes are epistemic, informing how questions are framed and which answers are featured. What, then, does an editorial board owe the discipline?
Opinio Juris has centred this question since its relaunch as 2.0 in 2018. Intentional decisions introduced by the team included the geographic and methodological expansion of the editorial board, an open approach toward submissions “especially those from parts of the world that are underrepresented in the international-law blogosphere”, the proliferation of symposia convened with partners, and copious support for early-career and first-time authors. We treat these interventions as commitments to the discipline that demand continuing work, which we hope is reflected in what and how we publish.
When preparing this post, I reread Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice alongside José Medina’s on epistemic resistance. To Fricker, hermeneutical injustice occurs when a gap in a community’s shared interpretive resources leaves some of its members unable to make their experience intelligible, to others and sometimes to themselves. While recognising the same harm, Medina locates its source elsewhere. According to him, marginalised communities often already have the concepts they need, developed in struggle to make sense of experiences that the dominant — or dominating — refuse to understand and so decline to name. The injustice materialises in this refusal to engage, which Gaile Pohlhaus terms wilful hermeneutical ignorance and on which Medina builds.
To me, Medina’s account better aligns with our discipline. The concepts needed to name the structures of Third World dispossession, settler colonialism, and the exclusion of entire peoples from protective regimes, among others, have long circulated in Third World and indigenous circles. Mainstream international legal scholarship, by contrast, has proven slower on the uptake, labelling these concepts political or polemical, and thus excusing itself from engaging with the periphery. Since uptake is what blog editors control, at least through the submissions we review and the symposia we curate, our responsibility is to carry these concepts to the centre of the discipline. Editorial decisions have the potential to influence which bodies of practice and which bodies of testimony are treated as part of international law at all. The depravities specific communities have experienced in the past few years make that responsibility more pressing, as we seek to chip away at hermeneutical injustice post by post.
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In this vein, I am delighted to inform readers that Jinan Bastaki has joined Opinio Juris as a contributing editor. Jinan is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi, where her research spans public international law, refugee law, forced displacement, human rights, and citizenship. She holds degrees from the LSE, Berkeley, and SOAS, and previously served as Associate Professor of International Law and Vice-Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs at United Arab Emirates University. Through her scholarship and teaching, Jinan has long contested forms of hermeneutical injustice. Her early research examined the position of Palestinian refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, reading their exclusion from its ambit as structural, a matter of “multiple displacements, multiple exclusions” that reveals how the refugee regime was built and for whom. Her later work in Citizenship Studies follows displaced Palestinians into the vicissitudes of citizenship that emerge between resettlement and return. In both cases, she supplies the discipline with concepts that help understand why an entire refugee population was, with no small irony, placed outside the regime designed to protect refugees.
A second strand of her research looks beyond the Convention altogether. None of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states is party to the 1951 Convention. Yet, because their societies are structurally and existentially dependent on migrant labour, the region hosts some of the world’s largest migrant populations — a proportion of 10:1 in the Emirates alone — including many who were displaced by conflict and then scooped up by capitalism’s labour channels. Most scholarship on refugee protection begins from the Convention and its parties. In this additional strand, Jinan explores the states outside it, asking what the Global Compact on Refugees and temporary protection regimes might offer to Kuwaiti, Bosnian, and Syrian refugee communities. In this way, her research is a form of epistemic resistance, unsettling the Convention-centred order that constrains thinking about refugee law.
Writing from Abu Dhabi adds another dimension to her scholarship. While the US election this week may have taken the wind out of the American-Israeli war against Iran, the implications for international law will continue to reverberate across the region. It is difficult to imagine what will come next or how regional alliances will be remade, not least for the Emirates, a state that was made to suffer precisely for its alliances, quixotically by both its enemies and allies alike. We can anticipate significant hermeneutical work — existential, too — in the years ahead.
On that note, Jinan’s arrival could not be timelier. Welcome to Opinio Juris, Jinan!