Chapter 4 considers how duties of international cooperation safeguard sovereign equality by reconciling the territorial sovereignty of coastal states with landlocked states’ rights to access the oceans through negotiation or binding arbitration.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that states have accepted obligations of mandatory cooperation with respect to a variety of other transboundary harms, including piracy, terrorism, and at least some cyberattacks.

Chapter 13 concludes by recapping the book’s key themes, considering potential obstacles to mandatory cooperation, and identifying other matters of international concern, such as pandemics, that are good candidates for mandatory cooperation under the equitable conception of sovereign equality.

Chapter 10 examines whether states bear duties of international cooperation with respect to forced migration, including the mass displacement caused by Myanmar’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against its Rohingya Muslim minority. It makes the case that the international community has accepted the protection of forced migrants as a common concern of humanity under the community’s joint stewardship.

Chapter 1 draws on the history of Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine to distinguish two conceptions of sovereign equality under international law. It argues that that international law in the twentieth century embraced a constitutional and equitable conception of sovereign equality, generating state obligations to cooperate with one another to resolve disputes over matters of common concern in accordance with equitable principles.

Chapter 3 shows how the international law of the sea moved away from state unilateralism in favor of the equitable model of sovereignty by requiring states to resolve disputes over international fisheries and maritime boundaries through cooperation in accordance with equitable principles.

Chapter 9 explains how duties of international cooperation apply to the international community’s collective responsibility to safeguard international peace, security, and human rights. With the establishment of the United Nations, the Grotian paradigm of states deciding when to use force for themselves shifted to a collective stewardship model whereby states must cooperate with one another to avoid armed conflict, punish atrocity crimes, and combat global poverty, including through collective consultation, negotiation, and peaceful dispute resolution.

Chapter 2 explains how international law governing rivers has evolved to establish a requirement that upstream and downstream sovereigns must consult and negotiate in good faith to determine mutually satisfactory solutions for the shared use of rivers.

Chapter 7 examines climate change as a transnational and existential threat to humanity generally, and to certain smaller and vulnerable states most dramatically. Since it poses an existential threat to low-lying coastal states and raises the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, Chapter 7 makes the case that climate change should be understood to trigger duties of international cooperation.

Chapter 8 considers international territorial administration through multilateral governance structures, devoting special attention to Antarctica as a global res communis for peaceful exploration and scientific study.

Chapter 6 shows that international environmental law embraces an equitable approach whereby states must cooperate to suppress transboundary pollution.

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

Chapter 11 uses antitrust law as a case study to explore the phenomenon of extraterritorial regulation. It argues that the principle of sovereign equality requires states to resolve disputes involving fields of concurrent prescriptive jurisdiction through mandatory cooperation.

This chapter assesses the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional project as an international regime. Although ASEAN’s regime is underpinned by unique features, certain characteristics of other regional integrations are still evident. Accordingly, ASEAN’s regime is devoid of complete synchrony of state parties’ normative interests and the surrender to implementing institutions of the regional project. Although ASEAN has been lauded as a successful regional integration project, its normative beliefs have been constructed around its identity as a regional project. Indeed, ASEAN member states might have taken inspiration from the EU, but they continue to be highly cautious about institutional arrangements that centralise decision-making and dilute state sovereignty. Hence, the gains of prosperity recorded so far are largely driven by individual countries’ efforts rather than a collective outcome of normative interests and obeisance to the implementing institutions.

This chapter examines the legal and policy regime that governs the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) and the underlying constraints. The AfCFTA, regarded as the largest trade arrangement after the World Trade Organization (WTO) in terms of the number of participating countries, seeks to utilise economic integration to promote pan-African development as a pathway to prosperity. With a commitment to eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) in intra-African trade, the AfCFTA is governed by general and specific objectives as well as principles aimed at making the agreement a transformative instrument of African prosperity. While the AfCFTA is a consequence of normative beliefs and common identity of the state parties, there are fears that NTBs and prevalent weak institutions could frustrate the expected outcome. This further buttresses our contention that normative interests should be mutually constitutive with the institutions established to manage the underlying implementation for prosperity to be realised. Although development and, ultimately, prosperity are well constructed under the AfCFTA agenda, there must be complementarity between the AfCFTA regime and the implementing institutions. This chapter proffers the way forward to navigate these dynamics.

This chapter investigates the legal instruments that govern MERCOSUR and the degree to which they have facilitated prosperity in the region. Even though it is an international regime, MERCOSUR remains a project for a future single market. In comparison with other regional integrations in this book, MERCOSUR members’ implementation of commitments has not unleashed regional prosperity. This is generally attributable to incongruity between the normative interests and beliefs in the state parties’ responses to MERCOSUR’s regime. Therefore, institutional functions and the level of implementation are not proportionate to the level of prosperity so far experienced. Indeed, MERCOSUR has not totally dismantled restrictions on intra- MERCOSUR trade, which couples with the delay in adoption of a number of secondary rules. To realise the prosperity gains of regional integration, state parties must synchronise the normative interests and beliefs in the implementing institutions.