New visitor at iCourts - Umut Yüksel

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.