Restrictive Measures in International Public Law: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Application

The article provides for an overview of institutionalization of legitimate coercion in framework of public international law. According to foundations of legal theory, coercive measures are deemed to be legitimate, when they occur in response to violations of rules committed by the subject. In the regard of these breaches certain entities are authorized to apply coercive measures. At the same time, coercion can be treated as means of ensuring that subjects comply with the rule enshrined in the legal norms. Thus, understanding coercion and the limits of its legitimacy requires conceptualization of this concept taking into account the real characteristics of the legal system (criteria for the legitimacy of restrictive measures), research into the typology of grounds for the use of coercion, as well as types of coercion depending on the social and legal context, the type of legal relationship and the subject authorized to use coercion. The theoretical and practical understanding of these issues is presented in this paper.Research purpose is to investigate the mechanism of coercion in public international law, defining the criteria of its legitimacy and ways to institutionalize legitimate coercion in the context of international relations. In order to achieve this goal, the concepts of “coercive measures”, “sanctions” and “countermeasures” are analyzed, and the differences of coercive measures in the context of their application are outlined. Applied method embrace: formal-logical method (to analyze conceptual approaches to coercion in international law); discourse analysis (to identify descriptive characteristics of coercive measures in modern doctrine and rhetoric of international relations); comparative legal method (to analyze similarities and differences of legal institutions in multiple jurisdictions, taking into account species differences and characteristic properties of these institutions). The study provides an overview of the varieties of coercion in international law, as well as doctrinal positions on the criteria of legitimacy of coercion and types of coercive measures.