‘Knowledge flows. Bodies don’t.’ This thought has stayed with me after co-authoring a recent piece for Stanford University’s CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics with Julia Schutz Veiga and Tony Lai on how international environmental law often treats Indigenous knowledge as a commodity while keeping Indigenous Peoples outside the rooms where decisions are made.
And the more I think about it, the more I realise this logic doesn’t stop at COP meetings, UN corridors or treaty negotiations. A similar form of gatekeeping happens inside academia.
Academic institutions also decide who enters, who belongs, and what counts as ‘normal’ scholarship. They define what is focused, what is neutral, what is rigorous, and what is too political, too broad, or too unconventional.
But as Frantz Fanon taught us, the figure imagined as ‘neutral’ is never neutral; it is historically shaped. Neutrality is not neutral. In much of academia, ‘the researcher’ is still implicitly imagined as a white, Western, English-speaking man. Anyone who deviates from that model faces questions others never have to answer.
In our piece, we call this ‘The Berghain Problem’ — named after the famous Berlin nightclub where entry is gatekept by bouncers enforcing unwritten, opaque rules. International law, much like Berghain, operates through selective entry. Those who get in are treated as insiders. The criteria for inclusion are rarely made explicit and the consequences of exclusion are rarely acknowledged.
This matters not only for justice, but for the quality and legitimacy of the knowledge that international law produces. When participation is filtered through informal gatekeeping, we lose perspectives, questions, and forms of reasoning that could strengthen the system.
Read the full piece at Stanford CodeX: The Berghain Problem — How International Law Gatekeeps Indigenous Peoples.
Henrique Marcos 