The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) remains one of the most ambitious achievements of post-war international diplomacy. It gave the oceans a legal order where earlier there had been overlapping claims, uneven practice, and the constant temptation to let raw power settle contested questions. It balanced the rights of coastal states with the needs of maritime powers and offered a framework within which navigation, resource use, marine research, and dispute settlement could be managed with a measure of predictability. Even today, despite all the strain visible across the world’s most contested waters, there is no viable substitute for it.
Yet if one wishes to understand why UNCLOS now appears insufficient in practice, the clearest point of departure is the Strait of Hormuz. Transit passage is protected in law, yet geography still enables coercive leverage. Threats of disruption resonate immediately through energy markets and shipping calculations, and legal entitlement alone does not neutralise the strategic value of a chokepoint. The crisis of UNCLOS is not that the law is absent, but that law, by itself, is no longer enough where coercive capability and strategic location combine.
The problem, then, is not the absence of law but the weakening of the assumptions on which it once rested. UNCLOS was negotiated in an era when codified rules were expected, over time, to shape state behaviour. That expectation survives, but it no longer operates with the same force.
The Taiwan Strait illustrates this erosion in a subtler but equally revealing form. Legally speaking, straits used for international navigation fall under a transit-passage regime that protects the continuous and expeditious movement of ships and aircraft. At the same time, legal analysis of the Taiwan Strait has shown how navigational questions there are entangled with wider disputes over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and strategic signalling. The problem in such a theatre is not an outright collapse of law. It is that law becomes drawn into the strategic contest itself.
The South China Sea is where this reality appears in its starkest form. The 2016 arbitral tribunal ruled in favour of the Philippines and held that China’s expansive historic-rights claims had no legal basis under the convention. Yet the ruling did not produce compliance on the water or reverse the strategic effects of coercive presence and island-building.
That experience should have ended any lingering illusion that a rules-based order can sustain itself through declaration alone. That is why reimagining UNCLOS should not mean reopening its foundational bargain. Any attempt to renegotiate the convention wholesale would almost certainly weaken it. The better course is to preserve its normative core while building a more credible architecture of implementation around it. The convention does not need a new philosophy. It needs stronger habits of enforcement, clearer interpretive convergence, and wider political investment in its defence.
One part of that effort must be institutional. UNCLOS has dispute-settlement mechanisms, but it lacks a politically visible process through which states parties collectively track patterns of persistent non-compliance. Once a judgment is issued, violations often fade into episodic news rather than being tracked as part of a cumulative record. A reimagined UNCLOS should therefore include some form of compliance review among states parties, not as a supranational enforcement authority, but as a structured means of documenting obstruction of lawful activity, disregard of legal findings, and coercive conduct at sea. International order weakens when memory is short. It strengthens when conduct is recorded, compared, and repeatedly brought back into diplomatic view.
Another part of the effort must address the methods by which coercion is now actually practised. Contemporary maritime competition rarely arrives in the simple form of open naval confrontation. It more often proceeds through coast guards, fishing fleets, and other ostensibly civilian instruments chosen because they blur the line between civilian activity and strategic pressure. The ambiguity is deliberate: it slows response and complicates remedy. The difficulty is sharpened by the fact that Article 298 allows states to exclude many disputes concerning military activities from compulsory dispute settlement. A reimagined UNCLOS must therefore place greater weight on the substance of conduct rather than the label attached to it.
But implementation cannot be built through legal doctrine alone. It also requires political instruments that sit between condemnation and escalation. Too often, the choice seems to lie between issuing statements and dispatching warships. That binary is unhealthy both for law and for stability. Between those two poles lies a wide field of action: coordinated diplomatic protests, common legal positions, transparent incident reporting, port-state scrutiny, regulatory measures against entities involved in unlawful conduct, and targeted economic restrictions on organisations repeatedly linked to coercive maritime behaviour. None of this would militarise UNCLOS. On the contrary, it would give the convention a more usable political shield.
This is where bilateral, minilateral, and plurilateral arrangements can give a reimagined UNCLOS practical force. The convention is universal, but its implementation cannot wait for universal consensus. What is needed instead is a layered architecture of support in which different formats reinforce the same legal order from different directions.
Bilateral arrangements can provide the most immediate reinforcement. They allow states with convergent interests to align legal positions, deepen maritime domain awareness, conduct exercises, and build habits of consultation. India and Japan, for example, reaffirmed their commitment to freedom of navigation and maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea. Bilateral partnerships cannot solve the problem by themselves, but they can turn abstract support for UNCLOS into repeated state practice.
Minilateral arrangements are useful for a different reason. They gather a small number of capable states around a focused objective without the rigidity of formal alliance structures. The Quad’s Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, launched in 2022, was designed to enhance maritime domain awareness and provide a more integrated maritime picture for partners across the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region. Analysis of the initiative has stressed its role in improving real-time awareness, strengthening regional capacity, and supporting open sea lines of communication. That matters greatly for a reimagined UNCLOS, because many maritime violations succeed by remaining deniable or poorly documented.
Plurilateral arrangements can extend legitimacy and scale without demanding the impossible unity of the full international system. The European Union’s Coordinated Maritime Presences in the northwestern Indian Ocean, launched in February 2022, provide a useful example. The mechanism was designed to improve coordination among existing national naval and air assets in a maritime area of interest while remaining voluntary and leaving assets under national chains of command. In practical terms, plurilaterals can widen the pool of states invested in maritime order and ensure that chokepoints such as Hormuz are not left to episodic crisis management alone.
For India, this layered approach holds particular value. India has a direct interest in safe sea lines of communication, in preserving the integrity of the maritime commons, and in preventing coercive precedents from hardening into accepted practice. At the same time, it is well placed to contribute without being absorbed into rigid alliance politics. India’s diplomacy can support freedom of navigation, peaceful dispute settlement, capacity-building, and practical maritime cooperation while retaining strategic autonomy.
UNCLOS reimagined, then, is not a call for a new constitution of the seas. It is a call to rescue the existing one from strategic insufficiency. Hormuz reminds us that even settled legal rights can remain vulnerable when geography gives coercion real leverage. The Taiwan Strait shows that navigational freedoms can be clouded when law is folded into sovereignty disputes and strategic signalling. The South China Sea demonstrates most starkly that a binding legal ruling without sustained implementation cannot by itself restore order. The answer lies not in abandoning UNCLOS, but in surrounding it with stronger compliance mechanisms, clearer interpretive discipline, and a denser network of bilateral, minilateral, and plurilateral cooperation.
If the twenty-first century is not to drift toward a maritime order shaped increasingly by intimidation, ambiguity, and incremental fait accompli, the law of the sea must enter a second phase of life. Its principles remain sound. What no longer suffices is the assumption that sound principles will enforce themselves. The task now is to ensure that the legal order at sea is matched by a political and operational order willing to defend it.
