In this chapter, Richard Collins assesses the contribution of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s dispute settlement procedures to the resolution of maritime disputes. In particular, this chapter explains that recent decisions of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) have grappled with a range of international legal issues that are not directly related to the law of the sea, such as sovereignty, human rights, and sovereign immunities. This chapter observes that this development has led some commentators to criticise ITLOS for jurisdictional overreach. This chapter pushes back against this criticism. It argues that ITLOS’ engagement with international law regimes going beyond the law of the sea is a necessary recognition of the integrated and interconnected nature of the modern international legal system and, ultimately, leads to a strengthening of the rule of law.

Chapter 4 focuses on Chinese coercion in the East China Sea, where China has maritime territorial and jurisdictional disputes with Japan. I explain the trend of Chinese coercion in the East China Sea while conducting two in-depth case studies: the Sino-Japan boat clash incident of 2010 and the incident of Senkaku nationalization in 2012. As the cost-balancing theory argues, the costs and benefits of coercion explain when and how China coerces. In the pre-2005 period, the need to establish resolve was generally low, whereas the economic cost was high. China, therefore, refrained from coercion. The need to establish resolve was briefly higher in 1996 and 1997, but China did not utilize coercion in these cases because of its equally high need for resolve and high economic costs. Because the East China Sea is not China’s core interest, its issue importance is not sufficiently high to justify the use of coercion. When the need to establish a reputation for resolve is high and the economic cost low, China used coercion, as seen in the post-2005 trend and, in particular, the 2010 and 2012 cases. It refrained using from military coercion for fear of potential geopolitical backlash.

Chapter 3 examines Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. My previous work examines the overall trends of Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. I find that China used coercion in the 1990s because of the high need to establish a reputation for resolve and low economic cost. China used militarized coercion because the US withdrawal from the Subic Bay in Southeast Asia and the focus on Europe reduced China’s geopolitical backlash cost of using coercion. China then refrained from coercion from 2000 to 2006 because of the high economic cost and low need to establish a reputation for resolve. It began to use coercion again after 2007, but because of the increasing geopolitical backlash cost since the post-2000 period, Chinese coercion remains nonmilitarized, which includes economic sanctions and gray-zone coercion. This chapter also examines three case studies – the cross-national comparison of China’s coercion against the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, the Sino-Philippine Mischief Reef incident in 1995, and the Sino-Philippine Scarborough Shoal incident in 2012. These case studies demonstrate that the mechanisms of the cost-balancing theory are present in them.

Provisional arrangements are a legal tool that provides states with an option for utilising fisheries and offshore hydrocarbon resources in a mutually acceptable way where they are unable to reach a maritime boundary agreement. The aim of this chapter is threefold: to illustrate that such arrangements are effective in preventing violent escalation of maritime disputes, to examine how provisional arrangements operate in practice, and to examine what legal issues may arise in reaching such arrangements. First, the chapter highlights several practical examples of incidents in and outside areas covered by provisional arrangements. It then argues that the obligation to negotiate and the obligation of restraint under Articles 74(3) and 83(3) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are complementary and interrelated. Finally, the chapter examines the legal aspects of politically sensitive issues involved in negotiating provisional arrangements: the definition of the area for provisional arrangements and the question of excluding prejudice by the arrangement to the parties’ claims.