The defocalizing effect of international courts: evidence from maritime delimitation practices
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- dc.contributor.author Yildiz, Ezgi
- dc.contributor.author Yüksel, Umut
- dc.date.accessioned 2025-01-08T07:46:14Z
- dc.date.available 2025-01-08T07:46:14Z
- dc.date.issued 2024
- dc.description Data de publicació electrònica: 29-06-2024
- dc.description Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.
- dc.description.abstract Can international courts influence state policies and facilitate interstate cooperation? Existing literature argues that they can. Courts can make cooperative outcomes easier for states by formulating or endorsing rules around which state expectations and practice can converge. While it is widely assumed that court rulings may become focal points and play a role in harmonizing state practices, we know little about the conditions under which they have such an effect. We suggest that court rulings can often have an opposite, defocalizing effect, which may durably harm the prospects of convergence around what the law requires. We introduce defocalization as a process and discuss its possible types and implications. We argue that defocalization may be driven by incongruence of court rulings with existing treaty law and state practice and inconsistency of rulings over time. We illustrate our argument by examining the effect of key judicial rulings on the convergence of state views about the appropriate maritime delimitation rules by relying on an original dataset. Our findings show how defocalization unfolds and suggest that complexity can accumulate over time through legal rulings that are incongruent with existing state practice or treaty law, and can be maintained through inconsistent court decisions.
- dc.description.sponsorship This research was generously supported by a Spark grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant agreement No 190545) as well as by the European Research Council (grant agreement No. 740634) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (grant agreement No. 101109832) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
- dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
- dc.identifier.citation Yildiz E, Yüksel U. The defocalizing effect of international courts: evidence from maritime delimitation practices. Rev Int Organ. 2024 Jun 29. DOI: 10.1007/s11558-024-09545-4
- dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09545-4
- dc.identifier.issn 1559-7431
- dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/69002
- dc.language.iso eng
- dc.publisher Springer
- dc.relation.ispartof The Review of International Organizations. 2024 Jun 29
- dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/HE/101109832
- dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/740634
- dc.rights © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
- dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- dc.subject.keyword International courts
- dc.subject.keyword Focal points
- dc.subject.keyword Regime complexity
- dc.subject.keyword Maritime boundaries
- dc.subject.keyword International Court of Justice
- dc.subject.keyword International law
- dc.title The defocalizing effect of international courts: evidence from maritime delimitation practices
- dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
- dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion