Notes for Contributors

If you want to write about human rights, we’re keen to hear from you. You don’t have to be a member of the LSE Human Rights Blog Editorial Board or otherwise affiliated with LSE to submit a post. We are open to critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on human rights.

The editorial process

If you are interested in contributing to the blog, please email humanrights.blog@lse.ac.uk with a pitch of no more than three or four paragraphs, containing the following information:

• Your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and a few sentences about you—if you have links to any previously published writing, please do include those here. 
• An explanation of the topic you want to explore in your blog post, and the argument you plan to make. 
• An overview of how you plan to structure the piece, and a sampling of the sources you intend to cite.
• An explanation of why this topic is timely or otherwise relevant to the Human Rights Blog.
• A proposed title for the piece, if you have one.

NOTE: Submissions of already-completed drafts are allowed (so long as they have not been previously published in any form), but when possible we prefer that authors send us pitches rather than complete drafts so that we can work with you to ensure that the piece is a good fit for the blog.

The editorial team meets every other Monday to discuss and make decisions on submissions received in the past two weeks. If your pitch is accepted, we’ll contact you to let you know and you will be assigned to a pair of editors who will work with you to develop it further. Once you send us a draft, your assigned editors will make any necessary edits and send it back to you for revisions. Please be patient with us throughout the process, as it may take several weeks or more from start to finish.

We receive a large number of blog submissions and our editors appreciate your patience whilst they review your piece. However, if your pitch is extremely time-sensitive (for example, it concerns a rapidly-developing news story), please indicate that in the email and we will do our best to get to it as soon as possible. 

We encourage you to engage with any comments that are made on the piece once it is published, but you will need to do so via the Editorial Board.

Published articles should be between 500 and 1000 words long. Audio-visual contributions are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a short introductory paragraph.

Blog posts should be thought-provoking and accessible. We invite content in the form of reviews and previews, interviews, political and legal commentary, media analyses, reports on current events, cultural critiques and observations, short films and audio material. 

Blog Guidelines

Content

• Submissions should reflect original, unpublished work.
  • We prefer submissions that adopt an evaluative argument on a topical human rights issue – we do not publish overviews or descriptive submissions.
  • Submissions that analyse a human rights issue in a particular place should be discussed in the context of global debates and trends.
  • All pieces should be between 500 and 1000 words, not including references.
  • Blog posts should adopt an academic, as opposed to polemical tone.
  • Hate language including but not limited to racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and homophobic speech will not be published. This includes the use of stereotypes and racial tropes, and the denial of historical events.

 

Formatting and referencing

• Be wary of plagiarism. All sources should be reliable and referenced within the text and in a bibliography.
• Where academic citations are required, we prefer authors to use Harvard referencing.

 

Publication

• Images may be included in your post, but these must not violate copyright.
• Authors should seek the permission of the editors prior to cross-posting on a personal blog.

 

Last updated: November 2022