United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) @ 40: A Review Essay

 40 Years of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: Assessment and Prospects. By Tomasz Kaminski and Karol Karski. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025. 450 pp. Euro 220 (hb.). ISBN 978-1-003-49256-6 (eBook)

Keywords: UNCLOS, Maritime-law, Delimitation, Maritime Security, Marine-environment Law, Transit Rights

 Date: 10th September, 2025

UNCLOS at forty is not a museum piece but a living framework whose sutures are already straining under geopolitical and technological pressure. This is the central idea that the editors signal in the book under review that included contributions from academics, jurists, diplomats, and technologists.

Tomasz Kaminski and Karol Karski have long occupied neighbouring lanes in Warsaw's school of maritime-law scholarship. Kaminski first drew international notice with his granular studies of historic bays and "creeping jurisdiction" work that dissected how straight baselines can quietly expand a state's footprint at sea.

Karski, meanwhile, has spent three decades curating and updating Poland’s classic public-international-law handbook, a labour that sharpened his instinct for weaving doctrinal threads into an accessible narrative. Their earlier writings share a preoccupation with the tension between coastal-state ambition and systemic balance, a theme that anchors this anniversary volume.

The book’s architecture is unapologetically wide-angle: six long parts move from codification theory to maritime safety, mirroring the Convention’s own sweep while adding detours into cyber risk and port logistics. 

The introduction explains that this division was meant to “reflect the range of major issues arising in the application of UNCLOS, as well as trends and challenges for the development of the international law of the sea,” and it largely succeeds in that ambition.

 What might have become a loose federation of conference papers instead feels like a curated atlas: general reflections form the conceptual keel, after which the reader sails through delimitation debates, litigation practice, environmental stewardship, security dilemmas, and finally the sensor-heavy future of autonomous shipping. The sequencing matters: each thematic parcel gradually widens the lens from historical codification failures to the algorithmic frontiers now testing the Convention’s reach.

Part II of the volume on maritime zones and delimitation is the analytical powerhouse. Kaminski revisits his signature concern excessive straight baselines and demonstrates how some coastal states convert cartographic subtlety into sovereign overreach, while also sketching counter-measures that preserve freedom of navigation. 

 Marcin Kaldunski complements that inquiry with a forensic audit of the ICJ’s evolving toolbox, probing whether “relevant-circumstances” balancing has matured into a stable methodology or remains hostage to ad hoc equity.

Brodecki and Chyc's chapter on the Antarctic Treaty reframes that polar compact as the conceptual ancestor of today’s “common heritage” clauses—a reminder that normative experimentation often begins in the most inhospitable places.

By the time Pawel Czubik tackles the legal status of artificially emergent islands, the section has seeded enough comparative insight to let readers see continuity rather than chaos in the Convention’s boundary doctrine.

Jurisprudence supplies the toolkit for Parts III and IV that explore how those tools are wielded in courtrooms and conservation corridors alike. Aleksander Gubrynowicz resurrects Judge Manfred Lachs to show that ocean-first prudence can ripple from individual bench opinions into broader judicial culture. 

Environmental essays pick up that thread: Maja Sersic dissects Part XII as the still-beating heart of marine-environment law, while Tripmir Sosic traces the BBNJ agreement from diplomatic birth pangs to its near-terminal push for ratification, revealing a treaty system learning slowly to breathe beyond national jurisdiction.

Malgosia Fitzmaurice's whaling autopsy, laced with dry humour, critiques a paperwork labyrinth that can leave mammals unprotected even as it claims them in name. Together, these chapters argue that UNCLOS’s environmental arm still flexes but badly needs supplementary instruments if it is to catch up with genome mining and deep-sea dredging.

The penultimate part on maritime security may be the most topical. Tomasz Aleksandrowicz maps the legal voids exploited by drone-ridden terror skiffs, while Piotr Mickiewicz examines hybrid incidents from GPS spoofing in the Baltic to pipeline sabotage and evaluates whether UNCLOS offers enough jurisdictional scaffolding to respond effectively.

Their findings are sobering: the Convention’s drafters never imagined a world where a ransom ware note could divert a Panamax vessel or where a shipping container might conceal a cyber-payload. Yet the authors resist defeatism, sketching incremental upgrades shared threat attribution protocols, real-time data corridors, and modular liability schemes—that could be grafted onto existing articles without reopening the treaty text.

The volume’s flaws those patches of uneven tone, the occasionally loose chapter on land-locked-state transit or on Poland’s domestic spatial-planning regime are not trivial; they remind us that an anthology is always an archipelago held together by editorial bridges that can crack under intellectual weight.

However, even here the critique must be double-edged. Christian Bueger has long argued that maritime governance thrives precisely in “messy governance spaces,” where specialist epistemic communities rub shoulders with fishers, naval officers, and port-authority data scientists. By that measure, the book’s stylistic lurches may register less as editorial failure than as the textual echo of a domain that can never be reduced to single register. 

After all, the Law of the Sea today is interpreted simultaneously in The Hague’s oak-panelled courtrooms, on Sat-AIS dashboards in Singapore, and in the cramped chart-rooms of Coastal Guard cutters. Uniform prose risks embalming that plurality; a little “labyrinthine” flourish might therefore be the necessary residue of lived marine complexity.

The transit rights of land-locked states, seemingly a niche concern, erupt whenever Ethiopia eyes a corridor through Djibouti or when Bolivia resurrects its Pacific access claim. Embedding that discussion amid security-heavy essays on drone swarms in chokepoints invites readers to juxtapose hard-power flashpoints with the quieter politics of corridor diplomacy; the absence of explicit cross-references forces the analytic stitch work onto the reader, but it also models the bricolage that practitioners perform daily. 

One could argue that the editors missed an opportunity to provide stronger signposting. However, Buegerian counter-perspective insists that maritime law’s vitality lies in obliging its interpreters to forage across doctrinal silos, creating unanticipated linkages than a more “tidy” volume might pre-emptively foreclose.

Where the criticism bites hardest is the sporadic reluctance to interrogate UNCLOS’s foundational silences. The Convention, drafted in analogue ink, never anticipated algorithmic flag-of-convenience schemes or seabed mining consortia governed by opaque venture-capital boards. Several chapters confront these lacunae head-on mapping, for instance, how “grey-zone” coercion in the South China Sea bends but rarely breaks treaty language, yet the collection stops short of proposing a systematic rewrite. 

Ultimately, the volume’s achievement is to dramatize a doctrinal crossroads where sovereignty, common heritage, and algorithmic risk intersect. Melting ice caps redraw exploitable seascapes faster than boundary commissions can file reports. Cargo ships, now floating data centres, invite both state and non-state hackers to weaponries logistics. Meanwhile, geopolitical entropy US–China polarisation, Russia’s Arctic gambits, the Indo-Pacific’s Mini-lateral hedging injects uncertainty into even the most settled maritime corridors.

Measured with that yardstick, the anthology functions less as a commemorative plaque than as a navigational chart dotted with both hazards and uncharted opportunities. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers indeed anyone tasked with piloting ocean governance through the coming decade of dematerialized trade, rising seas, and proliferating grey-zone tactics will find here not just descriptive ballast but conceptual waypoints.

In forcing its audience to wrestle with inconsistencies, price barriers, and disciplinary collisions, the book does exactly what a “living constitution” should: it refuses closure, demanding perpetual renegotiation, and thereby keeps the maritime commons productively, if sometimes chaotically, alive.

Vishal Singh Bhadauriya is a Post-Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Visiting Fellow at Asian Confluence.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above and the information available are those of the author/s and can therefore in no way be taken to reflect the position of Asian Confluence

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