Lessons from successful maritime dispute resolutions in the Indo-Pacific

Lessons from successful maritime dispute resolutions in the Indo-Pacific
Dr. Bec Strating & Dr. Troy Lee-Brown April 3, 2023

The papers in this series Beyond the South China Sea: other maritime disputes in Southeast Asia have highlighted the persistence of ‘lesser-known’ maritime boundary disputes in Southeast Asia. Yet, they also reveal the efforts of regional states to resolve these disputes.

In 2022, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi stated that in the previous year, Indonesia had engaged in no less than 17 rounds of maritime boundary negotiations with the Philippines, Malaysia, Palau, and Vietnam. While the complex disputes of the South China Sea often serve to highlight the limits of maritime dispute resolution, 2022 ended with the welcome news that Indonesia and Vietnam had agreed to Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries in the waters surrounding the Natuna Islands after 12 years of bilateral negotiations. In numerous cases successful maritime boundary dispute resolution in the region has been due to bilateral negotiations, as Tharishini Krishnan’s paper in this series demonstrates, as well as an overall commitment to order and stability at sea.

Smaller powers, however, may use international public or collective diplomacy and legal mechanisms—such as international courts, arbitration tribunals, and conciliations—to defend maritime entitlements rather than relying on bilateral negotiations. Often described as the ‘constitution for the oceans’, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides the overarching framework for these international maritime dispute resolution (IMDR) mechanisms. The New York University School of Law’s ‘Maritime Dispute Resolution Project’ recently found that such mechanisms have been used to resolve a multitude of maritime disputes all over the world.

In International Relations, the scholarship on why conflicts end or endure tends to diverge between material versus ideational understandings: for example, realists tend to focus on the role of material and strategic interests in driving or de-escalating disputes; liberals on the use of cooperative and multilateral mechanisms such as those encompassed by the UNCLOS regime; and constructivists on the role of national identity, ideas and norms in shaping state preferences and behaviour. Yet, understanding maritime dispute resolution requires a more nuanced framework that can elucidate the interplay between material and ideational factors. Our maritime dispute resolution framework focuses on three features: first, the type of dispute; second, power asymmetry and state identity; and third, the type of dispute resolution process and the ruling/decision. The use of this framework allows us to understand the material and ideational factors that contribute to dispute resolution and examine lessons from the use of dispute resolution processes in Southeast Asia and across the Indo-Pacific.

continue reading...https://melbourneasiareview.edu.au/lessons-from-successful-maritime-disp...