Countermeasures

Martin Dawidowicz

Chapter 21 in Elgar Encyclopedia of International Sanctions, 2025, pp 75-78 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This entry examines the role and function of countermeasures in modern international law. As a unilateral measure of self-help, countermeasures have long been recognized as a feature of a decentralized international legal order. Still, the regulation of countermeasures in international relations raises a serious normative dilemma. On the one hand, countermeasures are ripe with the potential for abuse and this potential is exacerbated by the factual inequalities between states. On the other hand, countermeasures are a useful and necessary tool to enforce international law. Put differently, there is an inherent tension between the need for a more effective international legal order in spite of decentralization and the risks of abuse relating to the allocation of enforcement authority to individual states. Traditionally, this tension found expression in a bilateral enforcement model that only permitted the use of countermeasures in the relations between the responsible state and the directly injured state inter se. More recently, however, as international law has gradually moved away from the bilateral enforcement model, the law of countermeasures appears to have widened, enabling all states to take countermeasures – that is to say, third-party countermeasures – in response to the most serious assaults on multilateral public order. In an international legal order increasingly concerned with the enforcement of fundamental norms, the apparent recognition of third-party countermeasures in defence of multilateral public order marks the most important development in the modern law of countermeasures.

Keywords: Countermeasures; Third-party countermeasures; Multilateral public order and fundamental norms; Enforcement of international law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035339525
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