Can international courts influence state policies and facilitate interstate cooperation? Existing literature argues that they can. Courts can make cooperative outcomes easier for states by formulating or endorsing rules around which state expectations and practice can converge. While it is widely assumed that court rulings may become focal points and play a role in harmonizing state practices, we know little about the conditions under which they have such an effect. We suggest that court rulings can often have an opposite, defocalizing effect, which may durably harm the prospects of convergence around what the law requires. We introduce defocalization as a process and discuss its possible types and implications. We argue that defocalization may be driven by incongruence of court rulings with existing treaty law and state practice and inconsistency of rulings over time. We illustrate our argument by examining the effect of key judicial rulings on the convergence of state views about the appropriate maritime delimitation rules by relying on an original dataset. Our findings show how defocalization unfolds and suggest that complexity can accumulate over time through legal rulings that are incongruent with existing state practice or treaty law, and can be maintained through inconsistent court decisions.

国际法院能否影响国家政策并促进国家间合作？现有文献认为它们可以。法院可以通过制定或批准国家期望和实践能够趋同的规则，使各国更容易取得合作成果。尽管人们普遍认为法院裁决可能成为焦点并在协调国家实践方面发挥作用，但我们对其产生这种影响的条件知之甚少。我们认为，法院的裁决往往会产生相反的、模糊化的效果，这可能会持久损害围绕法律要求达成一致的前景。我们将离焦作为一个过程进行介绍，并讨论其可能的类型和含义。我们认为，去焦点化可能是由于法院裁决与现有条约法和国家实践不一致以及裁决随着时间的推移不一致而造成的。我们依靠原始数据集，通过研究关键司法裁决对有关适当海洋划界规则的国家观点趋同的影响来阐明我们的论点。我们的研究结果表明，离焦是如何展开的，并表明，随着时间的推移，复杂性会通过与现有国家实践或条约法不一致的法律裁决而积累，并且可以通过不一致的法院判决来维持。