Scientific reports increasingly warn that we are not doing enough to protect the ocean. Yet for decades, the law of the sea, the field Dimitris Panousos studies at the EUI Department of Law, has described itself as adapting, developing, and evolving to meet exactly these kinds of pressures. His PhD research looks at how this language of change is produced and repeated across the law of the sea, rather than trying to determine whether a particular development constitutes progress. "What I found interesting was that there was a consensus, that there is progress," he says. "Why do we have progress? And why is this progress?"
UNCLOS as a constitution and a living instrument
The modern law of the sea rests largely on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, known as UNCLOS. Its more than 320 articles cover navigation, marine resources, environmental protection, and the division of the ocean into maritime zones.
Two descriptions of the Convention have become common in the field. After its adoption, the president of the conference that produced it called it a "constitution for the oceans". Courts and scholars also describe it as a "living instrument", meaning a text read in light of the present, rather than frozen at the moment it was written.
For Dimitris, putting the two side by side was where his research began. A constitution, in his account, is rigid, a higher kind of law that is hard to change. A living instrument can be bent so that it still applies. "I thought that these two do not necessarily go together," he says.
As his research developed, Dimitris became less interested in treating the two ideas as opposites. His thesis argues that they work together. The constitutional metaphor provides a stable structure, and the living instrument metaphor makes it possible to describe movement within it. In his reading, this allows the field to present UNCLOS as both settled and continuously capable of adapting. But that combination also has an edge to it: If change can only be imagined as movement within UNCLOS, then more fundamental alternatives — ways of governing the ocean that might depart from the UNCLOS — become harder to put into words.
His research therefore looks less at individual legal rules than at the recurring arguments, metaphors, and interpretive habits through which states, courts, international organisations, and scholars make sense of change. In essence, he says, his research is about "how we agree that something rhymes with the law of the sea or not."
How the law of the sea talks about change
To trace this, Dimitris works directly from the field’s written output: academic scholarship, judgments of international courts and tribunals, written submissions by states, and statements by international organisations. Across these sources, he identifies a shared language he calls “motion”. Progress and evolution both carry a built-in direction, a movement towards something better. Motion does not change what can move forward or backward, in cycles or barely at all. The term lets him examine how the field narrates change without assuming, as “progress” does, that change is improvement.
The mechanisms he examines differ considerably: formal amendment, new agreements, and the interpretation and practice that develop around UNCLOS. Yet he argues that they are described through a similar pattern, in which change happens within the existing regime and the regime keeps its basic identity. The vocabulary that carries this pattern, he found, is often looser than he expected. He had assumed terms such as progress, evolution, and living instrument would do identifiable work in legal arguments. Instead, he found them used interchangeably, sometimes almost at random. “Sometimes I am reading ‘living instrument’ as if it is a decoration of a paragraph,” he says. “We just say it because we want to believe it.”
"There is this idea that everything happens for good," he says of the language he encountered, "and the law always progresses." He is careful not to make that judgement himself. "Who am I to say if there is progress or not?" Instead, he examines how that way of describing the field became so familiar, and what kinds of change it makes easier to express.
One example is the 2023 agreement on marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It emerged in response to environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, while remaining within the framework of UNCLOS. What interests Dimitris is how developments of this kind are then presented as evidence of the regime's capacity to evolve. "It all operates within the same logic of what we claim now that is failing," he says.
Formal amendment offers a contrast. UNCLOS contains procedures for changing the Convention itself, and none have ever been used. While acknowledging the standard reasons — that the procedures are demanding and the text took decades to negotiate — Dimitris looks deeper. He argues that "difficulty does not mean impossibility," which raises the question of why some forms of change have become so much more familiar in the field than others.
When the ocean does not follow legal boundaries
UNCLOS divides the sea into zones measured from the coast. The closer the water lies to land, the more control the coastal state has over it. Dimitris traces that logic back to the cannon shot. “We have what we call the cannon shot rule,” he explains. Before states could measure distances at sea precisely, a cannon would be fired from the coast and, he says, “as far as a cannon can go, this is a part of the sea we control”. Today, he notes, the law of the sea still organises rights and jurisdiction according to distance from land.
That inherited logic is now under pressure. Marine biologists and geographers, increasingly working alongside lawyers, have questioned whether those lines make sense for an ocean. Fish migrate across zones, and acidification is changing which species migrate. Rising sea levels raise hard questions for small island states whose maritime entitlements depend on their coastlines. Dimitris does not cast himself as a critic of the regime. What interests him is which assumptions about governing the ocean stay largely unquestioned even as these pressures grow. "We have a system that is relatively well respected," he says, "but yet has artificially divided the ocean in a way that we can see now is not proving to be enough."
In his view, these critical voices rarely reach the centre of the field. At a conference on progress and evolution in the law of the sea, he noticed that the discussion stayed on developments within the established system, while work questioning the division of the ocean received little attention. “This bubble of evolution and progress is so big,” he says, “that sometimes you can very easily lose the other part.” The result, as he sees it, is a field working with a relatively narrow understanding of what change can signify.
Law of the sea during armed conflict
His published work addresses a different question. In his article 'Intersecting Legal Frameworks at Sea: The Continued Applicability of the Law of the Sea in Armed Conflicts', published in the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, he asks which rules apply when an armed conflict reaches the sea. The article grew out of a project that predates his PhD.
The law of the sea largely governs states' rights at sea in peacetime, while the law of naval warfare regulates military operations. One long-standing view holds that once hostilities begin, the wartime rules displace everything else. Dimitris argues that the two run in parallel. Where naval warfare rules regulate an issue, they take precedence. Where they are silent, the law of the sea continues to apply. Otherwise, in his view, whole areas would be left where "there is no law".
From Greece to the EUI
Dimitris' interest in the law of the sea began in his home country: Greece. He started law school expecting to specialise in constitutional or public law, until a course on public international law introduced him to the field. The subject featured heavily there, he says, because Greece is surrounded by sea and has a close relationship with shipping. In his second year, he took part in a law of the sea moot court in Utrecht. "Somehow I got really hooked into this," he says. "I really started enjoying the specifics."
After a master's degree in Greece, he returned to Utrecht for a second master's at a university with a prominent law of the sea research centre. The EUI was a less obvious next step. It had researchers working on the subject, but no centre devoted to it, making it an exploratory choice rather than a predictable path. At the EUI, he found people outside his specialisation who questioned the assumptions of his field. "I think what I have been offered here is a different way of seeing things," he says.
Now in the fourth year of his PhD, Dimitris hopes to stay in academia. He sees the patterns he studies reaching beyond the law of the sea. When asked whether international law is dead in his view, he argues that “Our way of understanding international law cannot be exactly the same as it was in 1945.” It now has to account for more actors, such as individuals, private companies, indigenous communities, and other actors that do not fit its traditional focus on states. Does it need to evolve, then? He catches himself on the word. “In a way, it needs to change.”
Dimitris Panousos is a doctoral researcher at the EUI Department of Law. His doctoral thesis, ‘'Imagining Change: The Law of the Sea and Its Disciplinary Horizons’’, is supervised by EUI Professor Arnulf Becker Lorca (supervisor) and Professor Alexander Proelss (external co-supervisor).