Lunch seminar with Umut Yüksel

Taking it to Court: Uncovering Patterns in Judicialized Dispute Settlement

Arbitration and adjudication are options available for states to resolve their interstate disputes, yet they have been unevenly employed in at least two respects. First, states vary in their use of judicial venues as opposed to uniquely relying on bilateral negotiations. Second, the resort to arbitration and adjudication varies according to whether these procedures are initiated by a common accord of states or by only one of the disputing parties (based on prior bilateral treaties or shared institutional membership). Using new data on interstate adjudication in the fields of trade, human rights, and territorial and maritime disputes, we provide a first examination of when and why states resort to judicial settlement in various issue areas. After discussing methodological difficulties involved with establishing the determinants of judicial settlement, we illustrate our approach by focusing on states’ domestic political institutions, or regime type. We find that, overall, most disputes that are adjudicated are between democracies, but that most of this pattern may be driven by the fact that the possibility of adjudication simply does not exist between pairs of states with different regimes due to uneven membership in international treaties. In a subset of maritime boundary disputes on which we have more information, we find that joint democracy has no discernible effect on judicial dispute settlement. This project thus calls for carefully setting scope conditions for arguments about dispute settlement preferences, given the issues in dispute.

Speaker bio

Umut received his PhD (summa cum laude) from the Geneva Graduate Institute in November 2019 with a thesis entitled “Bargaining Over Maritime Boundaries in Times of Legal Uncertainty”. He has been a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Global Governance Center since 2019, working on two projects entitled “The Domain of Adjudication: Why States Abandon Decision Control” (co-PI) and “Testing the Focal Point Theory of International Adjudication”, both supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). He has also carried out a predoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with the support of the SNSF.

Umut’s research interests involve international security, international law, and more recently, comparative politics. He has led the elaboration of several datasets on interstate disputes, conflicts, and adjudication. His previous work examining the impact of resources and legal uncertainty on maritime boundary disputes and that of international court judgments on state practice have appeared in the Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights and the German Law Journal.

In addition to research, Umut has been a visiting lecturer on statistics and part of the team elaborating a social science methods sequence for international lawyers with the support of the International Law Department of the Geneva Graduate Institute as well as ESIL’s Interest Group on Social Sciences and International Law.

During his time in iCourts, Umut will work on finalizing and disseminating work on his ongoing projects. He will particularly focus on the links between regime type and states’ dispute and litigation behavior.

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Meeting ID: 642 6028 1245
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