Excited to share my article, now out in the Journal of Conflict Resolution! 🎉 I explore how international lawmaking can sometimes contribute to generating new disputes rather than help prevent them. Available OPEN ACCESS here: A thread 🧵1/9.

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The main takeaway is that international lawmaking can often contribute to the generation of disputes in the very areas it seeks to regulate. This plausible effect invites further theorization, as well as empirical study in fields like trade, human rights, and armed conflict. 9/9.

These findings survive various robustness checks and the mechanism sustaining them—that uncertainty leads states to adopt different positions (wrt maritime limits and delimitation methods), & different positions encourage disputes—finds quantitative and qualitative support. 8/9

I find support for my expectations: disputes are more likely to arise when legal uncertainty is high. Moreover, factors that make uncertainty weigh heavier on some dyads (such as the existence of offshore islands) are also associated with higher probability of dispute onset. 7/9

Here I show that this diversity in practice translates into disputes as well. To systematically examine my main expectation that legal uncertainty makes disputes more likely to arise, I rely on an original dataset of all states with potential common maritime boundaries. 6/9

My focus is maritime boundary-making, an area that witnessed important lawmaking activity. In recent research w/ @ezgiyyildiz (, we show that instead of unifying state practice over delimitation, key ICJ decisions introduced more diversity into them. 5/9.

I argue that when legal uncertainty is high, states have opportunities and incentives to make maximalist claims, adopting those rules and interpretations that are most favorable to them. This prepares the ground for competing claims, i.e., disputes. 4/9.

What is legal uncertainty? I define it as the disagreement among authoritative sources of law— custom, treaties, court rulings—about what the rules require. High legal uncertainty means there are several alternative rules and interpretations that states can choose from. 3/9.

Conventional wisdom suggests international law reduces disputes by clarifying the rules. I show instead that international lawmaking—through multilateral conventions and decisions of courts and tribunals—often creates legal uncertainty, which, in turn, encourages disputes. 2/9.

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