Does Treaty Commitment Enhance the Judicial Settlement of Territorial Disputes?

Abstract

This paper examines whether states’treaty commitments increase the probability of judicial settlement of territorial disputes. The research question is significantly crucial as the international society has continuously developed a series of judicial mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes while its empirical validity is not necessarily solid-rock. Utilizing the newly developed treaty commitment index and other datasets, the paper conducts the logistic regression to demonstrate the impacts of treaty commitments on three features of judicial settlement: issue claims, negotiations, and judicial settlement. The result of statistical analysis confirms that treaty commitments enhance the odds of issue claims and judicial settlement, but not necessarily the number of negotiations. The finding is mainly consistent with the constructivist claim that legal norms enshrined in treaty terms can socialize sovereign states.