About the journal

Policy facts

The journal

The CLRS Journal of Global Justice & Governance (ISSN 3049-1940) is a diamond open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to international law. It is published by the Centre for Legal Research and Studies, VidhiAagaz, and it gives a home to careful legal research on the questions that cross borders.

The journal publishes scholarship on one question that runs through international law: how the rules and institutions that govern relations beyond the State allocate power, responsibility and remedy, and whether they do so justly.

It studies international law through two lenses. Global justice asks whether the law is fair: who it protects, who bears its costs, who is heard in making it and who can hold others to account under it. Global governance asks how the law works: how it is made, interpreted, applied and enforced, and how the institutions that carry it gain or lose authority. The journal seeks scholarship from every legal tradition and region, and takes no position on the questions it publishes.

What the journal publishes

The journal publishes work in international law, including on:

• the international legal order and its institutions, among them the United Nations and the Security Council;
• peace, security and the use of force, international humanitarian law and post-conflict governance;
• international courts, dispute settlement and remedies, international criminal justice and State responsibility;
• international economic law: trade, investment, finance, development and the multilateral trading system;
• human rights and the protection of persons, including refugees, migrants and marginalised groups;
• environment, climate and natural resources, and the law of the sea;
• the governance of artificial intelligence, cyberspace, data and other new domains;
• the theory and history of international law.

International law must be the subject of the work, but it need not be its only method: work by political scientists, philosophers, economists and historians that engages international law and its institutions is welcome.

The full list of the journal’s fields is on the Aims and scope page.

Who may write for the journal

The journal accepts submissions from academics, research fellows, legal professionals and students. Every submission is assessed on the same standard of scholarship, whoever its authors are.

Open access

The journal is diamond open access. Every article is free to read, with no subscription or paywall, and authors pay nothing to submit or to publish. Scholars from every part of the world, including regions that are under-represented in legal publishing, can write for the journal and read it on equal terms.

Publication

The journal publishes two issues a year, online, in English. It follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and a double-blind peer review process, set out on the Peer review policy and Publication ethics pages.

History and support

The journal was founded in 2024 to give legal academics and practitioners a place for serious dialogue on the global challenges of governance and justice. It is fully supported by the Centre for Legal Research and Studies, an independent organisation committed to legal research and to global justice.

Through its commitment to international law, the journal hopes to contribute to an evolving understanding of how law can serve as a foundation for global justice and for equitable governance.

Ownership and management

The journal is published by the Centre for Legal Research and Studies, VidhiAagaz, which also provides its publishing platform, hosting, Crossref DOI registration and preservation. Its Editorial Board makes every editorial decision independently, and the publisher’s management takes no part in editorial or acceptance decisions.

The Centre for Legal Research and Studies, VidhiAagaz, appoints the journal’s Editorial Board. The Board is led by the Editor-in-Chief, who carries final responsibility for what the journal publishes. The members of the Board are listed, with their roles and affiliations, on the Editorial board page. The journal also draws on a Board of Advisors, whose members advise the Editor-in-Chief on the journal’s scope, standards and direction, and on particular manuscripts when the editors ask them to. The advisors give advice only; the decision always rests with the editors.

Editorial independence

Editorial decisions are made on the merits of the work alone: its originality, its scholarly quality, its relevance to the journal and the clarity of its argument. The funding the journal receives, the publisher’s technical services and any order for printed copies have no bearing on whether a paper is accepted. No author is given preference, or put at a disadvantage, because of their institution, seniority, nationality, religion, gender or any other personal characteristic.

Faculty members and students of the Centre for Legal Research and Studies are welcome to submit, and their papers are assessed in exactly the same way as papers from anywhere else. When a member of the Editorial Board submits a paper, another editor with no conflict handles it, and the member takes no part in the decision. Any editor who has a conflict of interest in a manuscript steps aside from it.

Editorial policies

The journal follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing issued jointly by COPE, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). Its policies are set out in full on the following pages.

• Submission guidelines: what the journal expects of a manuscript, and what happens from submission to publication.
• Peer review policy: how manuscripts are assessed, who reviews them and who decides.
• Publication ethics and malpractice: authorship, conflicts of interest, research involving people, misconduct, corrections and retractions.
• Open access, copyright and licensing: free access, the reader licence, self-archiving and preservation.
• Author charges: every charge an author may meet.
• Complaints and appeals: how to appeal a decision or complain about the journal.
• Privacy policy: what personal data the journal holds and why.

How the journal is funded

The journal is funded by the Centre for Legal Research and Studies, VidhiAagaz. Authors are not charged at any stage. The journal carries no advertising, and no sponsor has any say in what is published.

Printed copies of articles and issues, and hard-bound certificates, can be ordered from VidhiAagaz by anyone who wants them. These orders are optional, they are handled separately from the editorial process and they have no effect on any decision.

Publishing schedule

The journal publishes its articles in whole issues. The editors put each issue together, and all its articles go live together when the issue is published, with its contents page. Each volume has its own call for papers.

Each published article shows the dates on which it was received, revised, accepted and published, so that readers can see how it moved through review.

Access and archiving

All articles are free to read and download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Published content is preserved through the PKP Preservation Network and in VidhiAagaz’s own backups, so it will remain available even if the journal’s website changes.

Every article receives a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registered with Crossref under the prefix 10.63108, so that it can be cited and found reliably. The journal’s ISSN is 3049-1940.

Advertising and direct marketing

The journal does not carry advertising. When it sends a call for papers by email, it identifies itself truthfully. These emails go only to relevant scholars and institutions, and every email allows the recipient to opt out.

The journal never promises acceptance, publication by a particular date or a favourable review in return for payment or anything else. If you receive a message that claims to come from the journal and makes such an offer, or asks you for money, please report it to editor.jgjg@academyclrs.org.

Records and confidentiality

Every step in the life of a manuscript is recorded on the journal’s publishing platform: submission, screening, review, decision and correspondence, together with any appeal, complaint or ethics case. This record allows the journal to explain any decision it has made, and it is kept after a paper has been published or declined.

Manuscripts and reviews are seen only by the editors who handle them, the reviewers invited to assess them and, where the running of the platform requires it, the publisher’s technical staff. Nobody involved may use what they read in an unpublished manuscript for their own work.

Contact

The editorial office can be reached at editor.jgjg@academyclrs.org, or through the contact page. Questions about a particular manuscript are answered more quickly if they give its Manuscript ID.