'Adjudicating over Anarchy Judicial Remedies, Compliance, and Enforcement in International Law' - Dr Geraldo Vidigal

Dr Geraldo Vidigal

Geraldo Vidigal is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he lectures International Trade Law and Public International Law and coordinates the LL.M. in International Trade and Investment Law. Besides Adjudicating over Anarchy, he is co-editor (with Kathleen Claussen) of The Sustainability Revolution in International Trade Agreements (Oxford University Press, 2024). He publishes regularly on International Economic Law and International Dispute Settlement in peer-reviewed journals and high-level edited volumes.

Adjudicating over Anarchy: Judicial Remedies, Compliance, and Enforcement in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

Book Blurb: Without access to state-backed enforcement measures, international adjudicators must rely on their authority to influence real-world outcomes. Adjudicating over Anarchy: Judicial Remedies, Compliance, and Enforcement in International Law examines the judicial powers of international courts and tribunals and how these powers are used in practice. The book reviews, and offers a comprehensive theory for, the various social mechanisms that explain why and how international judicial pronouncements affect the behaviour of states, influencing the views of individuals within states as well as changing states’ mutual expectations of cooperative and sanction-worthy behaviour. It also considers how judicial remedies can induce compliance by targeting specific areas of disagreement, interpreting obligations, declaring violations and establishing how wrongdoer states must offset unlawful injury. An often untapped type of remedy relies on the ability of courts to determine permissible responses to breach: what measures other actors may take to respond to violations, compelling wrongdoers to comply with their obligations and provide redress for injury.

What made you write on this topic?

The book is about international courts, why what they say matters, and how they use their powers. I have always been fascinated by the idea that law is an instrument that changes reality merely by using words. That a piece of paper determines who has the power in a company, a family, even a country. Things are more complicated than that, of course, but the mere idea that a judge, a person with no military training sitting in an office, signs a piece of paper and snap, property changes hands, people receive punishment, a person gains or loses their job, their legal status, even their nationality, is almost unbelievable if you think about it.

So, naturally, that this happens in international law is even more fascinating. I know most international legal scholarship starts from the opposite end: international law is law and must be complied with, therefore non-compliance is the anomaly. But why? A large chunk of the book is dedicated to trying to come to terms with the fact that international courts have any influence at all over material reality. And I eventually get there, finding – which I hope will come as a relief of sorts – that international court decisions do change something in the world. And what they say affects not only the normative environment of people who like to see themselves as supporters of international law, but also the strategic environment of those who do not feel particularly inclined to act one way or the other depending on what a group of international lawyers in a distant city has said. Their strategic environment changes entirely because this particular group happens to have been accorded adjudicative authority under international law.

The rest of the book then considers how international courts exercise their adjudicative authority. The advantage of starting from the more fundamental question is that I do not have to be constrained by what specific international courts do, or what they believe they can do – once I have established how international judicial authority works, I can explore the limits of how this authority could be deployed. And, with that in mind and looking at the vast practice of adjudication over the past century, one can find quite a few international courts that have tested the limits of their authority.

How long did it take to produce your book from initial conception to publication?

This is a development of my PhD dissertation, which now informs the second and third, more ‘legal’,  parts of the book. The thesis was written, between Cambridge and various other cities I got attracted to in the process, between 2009 and 2014. The first part, where I try to understand how all of this works, took me another ten years to write, and two to publish.

I am very happy with the result, but also think that I was very lucky to have been able to find an academic career without a published book, and maybe even luckier that my topic was not one that faded out over the years. So my advice to those finishing a PhD is ‘publish as early as possible!’

What is the most difficult part about writing for you?

Letting go. Ultimately, people will read what you write, not what you thought you could have written and then decided against it. But, if you are an academic, it is very likely that you are the kind of person who does not think in terms of ‘Is this good enough?’ but in terms of  ‘Is this the best thing I can ever produce?’. And that can be a dangerous trap. 

So, for example, on the final year, once the argument of the book was essentially ready, I spent a month, maybe two, going over the most recent jurisprudence on non-compliance and sanctions by the Andean Court of Justice,  the ECOWAS Court of Justice, the Caribbean Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court – all of which had issued rulings on these issues since I had written the relevant chapters. Even for the PhD, I spent a week doing research on the Brčko arbitration, a 1990s arbitration between the two component entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina concerning the boundary between them. Would anyone come to a book talk and say, ‘How come you didn’t consider the Brčko arbitration?’. Very unlikely. But the arbitral tribunal used its powers in an almost unbelievable manner, and it worked: the political system designed out of thin air by the President in the Awards is still up and running, and arguably the Tribunal can still be reconstituted in case this system is violated. I just had to have a section on that.

Why should people read your book?

The book addresses conceptual questions surrounding the operation of international judicial authority while also engaging in fine-grained analysis of legal issues that appear in judicial practice, covering a wide variety of international courts. It will be relevant to those facing the same intellectual question I had when I started rewriting it for publication: why are international courts’ decisions relevant at all? For these people, the first part should be the most interesting. These are researchers in law but also those working on international relations or political science. I go beyond summarising all that has been written about compliance in the last decades and develop an original theory that explains, first, how law operates ‘horizontally’, that is, between peers rather than as enforced by an authority; I then inquire about the effects on this horizontal set-up of entrusting some actors with normative authority but not with the entitlement to mobilise organised social coercion to enforce their determinations (a very long way of saying ‘international courts’).

The research will also be relevant to those, including law practitioners, who are interested in the more concrete questions around how international courts deploy their remedial powers. My sections on the different types of remedies are heavily footnoted and refer extensively to international judicial practice, covering virtually every international court of the past century. So, if you are working before (or within) an international court and wish to know whether there is a precedent to ask for (or grant) a certain remedy, or if a procedure can be invoked in case of non-compliance, it is likely that it is in there. It may be that your precedent comes from the European Court of Human Rights, an investment tribunal, or the Mercosur court. But, having done a bit of practice in international adjudication, my experience is that an adjudicator is far more likely to grant something if there is a precedent – even if they do not always think it wise to say so in so many words.

What book is currently on your bedside table?

I try to make sure that, on my bedside table, I have mostly books unrelated to my job. I currently have Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, a historical novel taking place in twelfth-century England; and Glenn Alan Cheney’s Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, about a maroon society in seventeenth-century Brazil fighting for its existence against both the Portuguese-Brazilian and the Dutch West India Company. I am also painfully going through my first book in Dutch, a collected volume entitled Historische Verhalen: Korte verhalen uit de Gouden Eeuw [Historical Tales: Short Stories from the Golden Age], taking place in the same Golden Age as the fugitives’ plight.

What are you working on now?

I remain interested in how – with states being the ones with aircraft carriers, customs and border enforcement and central banks – international rules and institutions shape behaviour. The argument becomes maybe even more interesting when the message coming from many quarters is that they do not, or no longer do, or do only do as long as a handful of powerful leaders generously allow them to. I am not sure it is so simple. Legalised governance is deeply entrenched into contemporary minds but also the contemporary economy. There is only so much an aircraft carrier can do to enforce a copyright on the other side of the world or prevent another country from overconsuming the planet’s natural resources.