Constitution or Compass? A Quiet Renegotiation of the Maritime Order, ejiltalk.org

In June 2026, the China Institute for Marine Affairs published a substantial assessment of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Assessment Report on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: Achievements, Positioning and Challenges), timed to mark the thirtieth anniversary of China’s accession. The report is worth reading carefully. At the outset, the report defends UNCLOS’s “solemnity, integrity, and authority” (p. ii) against interpretive abuse, while simultaneously insisting that UNCLOS possesses no constitutional supremacy and is merely one pillar among several legal sources. This apparent contradiction is interesting as it signals a structured deployment of distinguishable argumentative registers, each calibrated to a different target. Attending to that structure, rather than to the substantive merits of any individual claim, arguably captures a wider moment in the development of the law of the sea. In this sense, this article does not focus on the substantive questions addressed in the report (the interpretation of article 121(3), the extended continental shelf, or the “constitutional” characterization). The object of the analysis is the architecture of the argument, rather than its conclusions. Läs artikel