Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Maritime Affairs
Specialization
Ph.D (Maritime Affairs)
Campus
Malmö, Sweden
Abstract
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) plays a pivotal and essential role in international maritime governance, providing a forum for nation states to develop and agree to international standards for maritime safety and security and the protection of the marine environment. IMO is widely perceived to be one of the most successful universal international organizations (IOS), because of the high technical quality of the conventions and other legal instruments it develops, and the near-universal acceptance of most of those instruments. IMO could be seen as an exemplar of the "technical" specialized United Nations agency, where nation-states set aside politics to agree on mutually-beneficial functional standards.
At the same time, there remains a persistent compliance gap—implementation and enforcement of IMO treaty requirements is far from as universal as ratification of those treaty instruments is. And IMO has lagged behind other IOS in its adoption of institutional treaty compliance mechanisms. Over the past half-century IOS working in fields as diverse as arms control, human rights, environmental law, and aviation have developed innovative and non-coercive centralized legal mechanisms to encourage state-party treaty compliance through, monitoring, evaluation, and mediation. This research asks why the IMO been slower to adopt some of these new mechanisms, how such mechanisms are being incorporated into the IMO treaty corpus, and where IMO institutional compliance mechanisms may go from here.
To answer these questions, this dissertation considers political and legal theory of state sovereignty, IO legitimacy, and nation-state compliance with international law. It then employs a discourse analysis methodology to look closely at the negotiation processes that led to the two major institutional compliance mechanisms that have been implemented for IMO treaties, to date: the STCW95 List of Confirmed Parties (STCW95 List), and the IMO Member State Audit Scheme (IMSAS). The dissertation conducts close textual analyses of a large and novel discourse corpus, including both official IMO discourse and the broader policy discourse surrounding the studied decision-making processes.
Comments
To be published