The Power of Small Talk Catching up with the Academic World of International Law

This chapter reflects on the often-invisible power of everyday informal exchanges in shaping academic life, knowledge production, and professional trajectories in international law. Drawing on the author’s experience as a Latin American scholar pursuing a PhD across Italy, Germany, and Ukraine, it shows how access to academic communities is not structured only by formal credentials or institutional resources, but by proximity to dense social spaces where casual conversations naturally take place. These spaces, largely concentrated in what is conventionally called the academic “global north,” function as global villages in which ideas circulate, reputations form, and opportunities emerge through brief, unscripted interactions. The chapter argues that academic precarity can be understood not only in economic terms, but also as a social condition marked by limited access to such everyday exchanges. Small talk appears here as a quiet but decisive infrastructure of academic life: a channel through which trust is built, information travels, and research agendas are shaped. By tracing how a series of accidental encounters influenced both the author’s intellectual development and career path, the chapter highlights how global inequalities in knowledge production are reproduced, and sometimes disrupted, through the most ordinary conversations.