During the Cold War, international law was characterized by stark political and ideological divisions.Footnote 1 The post-Cold War period appeared to promise a legal order founded on co-operation rather than competition, yet political and ideological contestation did not disappear.Footnote 2 Instead, it was reframed around the universalizing claims of liberal international law and the critiques of liberal hegemony that those claims provoked.Footnote 3 In this increasingly geopoliticized environment, international law came to be understood through competing accounts that emphasized globalisation and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the tension between a rules-based international order and geopolitical contestation, on the other.Footnote 4 No single political vision emanating from one centre of power could monopolize the meaning or universal content of international law in this new environment, given these tensions and related dynamics.Footnote 5 The meaning of international law is therefore contested across multiple layers: institutionally, through divergent interpretations by juridical bodiesFootnote 6; functionally, through the fragmentation of specialized regimesFootnote 7; and spatially, through regional approaches to the interpretation and application of individual norms.Footnote 8 The re-emergence of comparative international lawFootnote 9 can be understood as a reflection of this spatial logic.Footnote 10
Such a modus operandi of international law – premised on a plurality of interpretations and approaches – has been examined through both concrete case studies and more theoretical frameworks.Footnote 11 It has become increasingly common to speak of Russian approaches to international law,Footnote 12 Chinese perspectives on international law,Footnote 13 and even forms of inter-Asian law.Footnote 14 Alongside these national approaches, the role of regional organisations in shaping the content of international law has also attracted growing scholarly interest.Footnote 15 Here, again, the framework of comparative international law enables such examinations to be undertaken.Footnote 16
This article builds on this line of inquiry by examining how the content of international law is framed, interpreted, invoked, and applied by a single regional organisation and its Member States, namely the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) – a relatively underexplored subject in international legal scholarship. The OTS consists of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan as Member States, with Northern Cyprus, Turkmenistan, and Hungary as observer states.
Observation of this type, meanwhile, requires a specific methodological outlook. Unlike state-level analyses of Russian and Chinese approaches to international law – where state practice and divergent interpretations of international law can be more readily identified – or studies of the EU’s relationship with international law, which is significantly shaped by the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union,Footnote 17 the OTS lacks both the supranational institutional capacity to adopt binding regional law and, as will be seen, the attributes necessary to establish the emergence of regional or particular customary international law. In light of these caveats, this article argues that the OTS instead functions as a site of selective regional legal legitimation. Rather than openly rejecting general international law, it selectively mobilizes legal principles in ways that support particular geopolitical positions, thereby contributing to the broader contestation over the meaning of international law.
Given the OTS’ distinctive legal position, this article proceeds through a legal analysis of its principal political outputs – especially summit declarations and communiqués – supplemented, where relevant, by statements and resolutions of affiliated bodies, including the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic States (TURKPA) and the Turkic Academy. The core corpus of analysis consists of OTS declarations from 2009 to 2025, selected because they provide the most consistent and comparable record of the organisation’s collective positioning on issues of international legal relevance – notably the conflicts over Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus.Footnote 18 Through this analysis, the article identifies semantic shifts and justificatory frameworks that reveal the shared geo-legal positions of the OTS Member States, demonstrating how international law is selectively interpreted and applied by the OTS.
The purpose of this analysis, however, is not to treat these instruments as binding sources of law, nor to suggest that they alone establish particular or regional customary international law.Footnote 19 As has been noted, “resolutions cannot be a substitute for ascertaining custom”.Footnote 20 At the same time, however, the International Law Commission has observed that “[a] resolution adopted by an international organization or at an intergovernmental conference may provide evidence for determining the existence and content of a rule of customary international law, or contribute to its development.”Footnote 21 For the purposes of this article, declarations and resolutions are therefore primarily treated not as instruments for generating new customary rules – although they may contribute to such rules when assessed alongside the state practice of OTS Member States in universal bodies – but as means through which the selective and contested interpretation and application of international law can be traced. This selective and contested engagement with international law forms the theoretical basis of what may be termed the geojurisprudence of international law: the differentiated ways in which states apply, interpret, and approach international legal norms, even where comparable factual situations would appear to call for principled consistency.
The article proceeds as follows. Section I conceptualizes the geojurisprudential turn in contemporary international law and develops indicators for its operationalization. It explains why this framework provides a useful basis for examining the regional narration of legal principles within the OTS. Before turning to the selectivity displayed by OTS Member States in their application of international law, Section I also situates those states regionally, with particular attention to the Central Asian Member States that constitute the core membership of the Organization. It shows how regional integration law in this space has evolved under competing Russian, Chinese, and Turkish projects of regional ordering. Section II then turns to the OTS itself, tracing its emergence from Turkic co-operation initiatives, and examining its legal status and institutional structure. Finally, Section III analyzes the legal justificatory language used by the OTS to assess conflict resolution in Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus. It argues that OTS practice supports Azerbaijan’s claim to territorial restoration through a war of recovery doctrine. In relation to Northern Cyprus, however, the OTS emphasizes existing realities and Turkish Cypriot rights while rejecting the application of that very same war of recovery doctrine, despite the similarities between the two cases that would otherwise appear to call for consistent application. The conclusion argues that the OTS engages in a geojurisprudential application of international law, whereby international legal norms are approached, applied, and interpreted in a context-dependent, selective manner, rather than consistently.
I. The geojurisprudential turn in international law and regional ordering
International law is commonly understood as a universal project.Footnote 22 Functionally, however, this universal project has also been shaped – and at times contested – by forms of particularism grounded in civilizational identity and regional self-understanding, making “international law different in different places”.Footnote 23 Civilizational and regional differences have therefore repeatedly influenced the modus operandi of international law.Footnote 24
Great powers have emphasized and strategically mobilized such differences not only to justify departures from general principles of international law but also to construct regional spheres within which international law is interpreted through distinctive geopolitical vocabularies.Footnote 25 As Lauri Mälksoo has noted, “[f]ailing to reach universal recognition to their interpretations of international law, Empires and great powers will want to establish these ideas at least in their neighborhood: at least here, international law is indeed that.”Footnote 26 This dynamic produces a recurring tension between the universalist claims of international law and the pull of regional particularism.Footnote 27
This tension may generate regionally bounded understandings of legal order.Footnote 28 In its more explicitly realist form, however, it produces what may be described as a geojurisprudential turn. “Geojurisprudence” refers here to the conditions under which international legal argument becomes organised by geopolitical projects.Footnote 29 In functional terms, this logic may resemble the Schmittian idea of Großraum ordering: a model in which a dominant power claims authority to define the political and legal meaning of a wider region and to exclude intervention by spatially external powers.Footnote 30 More profoundly, however, geojurisprudence in the contemporary period does not entail a mere disregard for the universality of international law. Rather, it also involves the instrumentalization of international law’s application and interpretation, marked by a significant degree of selectivity and inconsistency. That is to be claimed; international law in this case is not abandoned but strategically redeployed for particular geopolitical purposes.Footnote 31
Understood in this way, geojurisprudence does not deny the existence of general international legal principles. Rather, it shows how those principles may be selectively invoked, qualified, displaced, or rearranged.Footnote 32 To that end, some powers rely on the dispositive character of many international legal rules to structure or reframe legal obligations, especially where no peremptory norm is implicated.Footnote 33 Others go further by invoking clausula rebus sic stantibus to contest the continuing force of treaty obligations, although international law treats such reliance as exceptional rather than ordinary.Footnote 34 Yet, in a formally universal international legal order, reliance on dispositive flexibility or on rebus sic stantibus often operates as a privilege of capacity: it is most readily available to states capable of sustaining the political, reputational, and material costs of performative departures from dominant interpretations of international law.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to suggest that only great powers deviate from, reinterpret, or selectively apply universal international law. Smaller states may also depart from core principles of international law or interpret them selectively when doing so serves perceived geopolitical necessities. It is here that geojurisprudence, particularly when grounded in concrete case analysis, becomes analytically useful. It demonstrates how states use international law selectively in accordance with their perceived geopolitical interests.
Functionally, such behaviour can be analyzed at the institutional level. As multilateral sites, international institutions provide a useful setting for examining how Member-State practice may “influence international law, including by concluding treaties, contributing to or catalyzing practice relevant to the formation of customary international law, and producing authoritative ‘subsidiary means’ for identifying the law”.Footnote 35 However, a distinction must be drawn between organisations with universal reach and regional organisations. At the universal level, particularly within the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the UN General Assembly, small states often have strong incentives to maintain formal fidelity to the UN Charter system. As has rightly been noted, “[r]epresentatives of small states know well that should commitments to the UN Charter system further erode, including restrictions on the use of force, their countries would be at risk.”Footnote 36
The regional level operates differently. Although deviation from general norms at the regional level may indicate that a state has a stronger political agenda to depart from multilateralism and institutional constraints,Footnote 37 within regional organisations, states may articulate more self-centric legal and political vocabularies.Footnote 38 This is largely because such behaviour is less likely to generate immediate reaction from the wider international community,Footnote 39 as activities of many regional organisations are less likely to warrant closer scrutiny both in scholarship and at the policy-making level.Footnote 40 Yet, as the remaining sections of this article will show, and as Anne Orford has also stressed, the behaviour of states within regional orders requires close observation, since it can reveal how the selective application of international law is conditioned by geopolitical interests.Footnote 41
For this purpose, it is first necessary to clarify how the geojurisprudential turn functions. To this end, the geojurisprudence of regional organisations can be operationalized through five indicators. First, states acting within a regional institutional framework must employ shared declaratory language. Second, that language must recur over time rather than appear as an isolated political statement. Third, it must invoke recognizable legal categories, such as territorial integrity, self-determination, or, for the purposes of this article, the war of recovery doctrine. Fourth, comparable disputes must be treated differently in ways that reflect geopolitical alignment rather than doctrinal consistency. Fifth, institutional decisions concerning membership/observer status or other forms of participation must also be considered, as they may reinforce particular forms of legal justification.
Before examining how the aforementioned geojurisprudential turn in international law can be observed in the activities of the OTS, however, it is necessary to situate the Organization within its Member States’ spatial and historical context.
A. The historical and geojurisprudential setting of the OTS Member States: the case of Central Asian states
Apart from Turkey, all current Member States of the OTS formed part of the Soviet Union before its collapse and had already come under Russian imperial rule before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Against this background, a brief examination of the historical engagement of the Central Asian states – which constitute a substantial part of the OTS membership – with international law is useful for understanding how the geojurisprudential turn within the OTS operates in practice. In many respects, the observations made in relation to Central Asia may also be extended to Azerbaijan, which shares a comparable post-Soviet legal and political legacy. For reasons of analytical coherence, however, this subsection focuses on the Central Asian Member States and does not examine Azerbaijan separately. This history, shaped by varying political conditions ranging from nation-state building to externally imposed legal and political modernization, may also help identify the variables that explain the selective application of international law within the Organization.
Imperial Russia’s treatment of Muslim-populated territories, especially in Central Asia, including Bukhara and Khiva, was shaped by the distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” communities. Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens classified Khiva, Bukhara, Eastern Turkestan, and Afghanistan as communities outside the full scope of positive international law, which he associated primarily with “civilized” peoples, justifying the conquest of the region.Footnote 42 During the Soviet period, however, this hierarchy was reformulated. Moscow institutionalized a formal principle of self-determinationFootnote 43 and created the Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Tajik, and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics,Footnote 44 although such recognition operated within a centralized political and legal structure that denied these republics independent external sovereignty.Footnote 45 As a result, indigenous forms of political organisation in Bukhara and Khiva were displaced by socialist nation-state building.Footnote 46
The collapse of the Soviet Union transformed this structure. The Central Asian republics entered the international legal order as sovereign states.Footnote 47 This process, however, unfolded in the shadow of older imperial formations and inherited legal structures that Central Asian states had to reconcile with their own projects of nation-state building. These projects often valorized pre-imperial forms of political ordering, thereby presenting Central Asian statehood itself as evidence of the region’s non-peripheral position vis-à-vis Russia.Footnote 48 Projects of nation-state building were further complicated by what has been described as the region’s “torn” position: societies shaped by overlapping civilizational, religious, post-Soviet, and state-building affiliations.Footnote 49 This tension contributed to the privileging – not of nation-state structures – but of tribal, familial, religious, and other post-imperial forms of affiliation.Footnote 50 In this sense, Central Asia’s contemporary legal-political position within the post-Cold War international legal order has been shaped by both the persistence of Soviet legal forms and the selective adaptation of external – mostly Western type – legal models.Footnote 51 Ultimately, despite the outlawing of socialism in most post-Soviet Central Asian states after 1991,Footnote 52
the prevailing post-Soviet legacy in … Central Asia, paired with failed political and legal reforms, not only led many [Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)] countries to violate the rule of law and international human rights law, but even ‘traditionalize’ their constitutions, penal codes, and legal practices in the same way as the Russian Federation maintained from the Soviet period.Footnote 53
These continuities have reinforced authoritarian forms of governance while coexisting with Western-oriented projects of legal modernization.Footnote 54 Efforts to transplant liberal type of legal norms have therefore operated alongside inherited Soviet practices and local legal-cultural frameworks, producing a layered and internally tense legal environment.Footnote 55
These developments generated enduring tensions, particularly in relation to legal transplants. On the one hand, post-1991 Western legal modernization projects promoted a renewed civilizational vocabulary through development-aid conditionalities and rule-of-law reform paired with the human rights discourse.Footnote 56 On the other hand, Soviet institutional memory and local legal-cultural legacies continued to shape normative structures in the Central Asian republics.Footnote 57 Situated at the intersection of these competing inheritances, Central Asian states developed a geojurisprudential reality in which legality is closely fused with political necessity. This may help explain, as the article later shows, why Central Asian republics as Member States of OTS apply international law selectively: not necessarily by rejecting it, but by adapting its principles to state priorities and increasingly regional alignments.Footnote 58
The OTS constitutes only one part of the broader regional milieu under examination. Two other major regional organisations – the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), shaped respectively by Russian and Chinese influence – are equally informative for the purposes of this article.
B. Major powers and regional ordering in Central Asia
As noted above, regional organisations function as an analytical site for examining how domestic political and geopolitical realities impact states’ interpretation of international law.Footnote 59 This type of self-centrism is partly possible because such settings tend to attract limited external scrutiny.Footnote 60 The regional organisations in which Central Asian OTS Member States hold overlapping memberships are no exception. In addition to the OTS, through which Turkey exercises strategic influence, Central Asian OTS Member States also participate, to varying degrees, in the EAEU, SCO, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are members of the EAEU and CSTO, while Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan are members of the SCO. Taken together, these organisations reflect institutional settings through which Russia and China contest Western liberal conceptions of international legal order.Footnote 61 Each of these organisations, and the major powers involved in them, however, has also shaped the region’s geo-legal environment in a distinct way.
Russia has exerted the most direct influence on post-Soviet Central Asia’s legal transformations because of the historical and institutional continuities inherited from the Soviet period.Footnote 62 This continuity has shaped not only the development of domestic legal orders, many of which remain modelled in part on Russian law, but also the professional milieus in which legal expertise is produced.Footnote 63 For many lawyers from the region, Russia continues to function as an important site of legal socialization, shaping how they approach and understand both domestic law and international law.Footnote 64
In contrast, China’s influence over Central Asia is characterized by a form of strategic invisibility. While not always clearly articulated, this influence has played a significant role in reshaping how Central Asian states conceptualize and apply legal norms in the post-1991 period. For instance, between 2007 and 2020, the People’s Republic of China offered a series of security training programmes to Central Asian technocrats, which resulted in the gradual adoption of Chinese-inspired models of security governance.Footnote 65 These developments – anchored in the Chinese Communist Party’s doctrine of “stability maintenance” – have led to a transformation in the legal and institutional approach to human rights in the region, with increasing reliance on surveillance, censorship, and other mechanisms of coercive social control to restrict human rights.Footnote 66 Beijing has also mobilized diverse institutional settings to contest Western liberal norms – particularly democracy and human rights – framing them as tools of ideological interference by the US and EU, and attributing regional unrest, such as the Kyrgyz revolutions, to Western efforts at “Westernizing” Central Asia.Footnote 67
Turkish influence, however, is primarily cultural in nature, though it can ultimately lead to legal transposition.Footnote 68 This is because Turkey positions itself in Central Asia as a key actor committed to facilitating both the decolonization and de-Sovietization of the region.Footnote 69 A notable example of this role is Turkey’s promotion of the Latinization of the Central Asian states’ alphabets in place of the Cyrillic scripts previously in use.Footnote 70
Alongside these policy initiatives, however, these three powers also largely use regional organisations as instruments of power projection. The CIS, CSTO, and EAEU reflect Russia’s effort to preserve influence in the post-Soviet space.Footnote 71 As such, they operate as sites of legal interpretation and norm articulation, where regionally bounded understandings of international legal principles may be expressed.Footnote 72
Within international legal scholarship, the ramifications of the EAEU and CSTO have received comparatively greater scholarly attention.Footnote 73 These studies claim that both regional organisations are paradigmatic of Russia’s efforts to consolidate a post-Soviet Eurasian regional international law vis-à-vis Western conceptions of liberal international law.Footnote 74
As regards the China-led regional integration, in the context of an evolving global multipolar order, the practices of the SCO have been instrumental in giving institutional form to an emerging model of authoritarian international law – a framework promoting authoritarian governance norms as evidenced by Tom Ginsburg.Footnote 75 Particularly, the SCO is portrayed as an organisation that aims to counter the three major “evils” that China, and also Russia, consider threats at both the domestic and international levels: separatism, extremism, and terrorism.Footnote 76 As a result, for instance, the SCO has developed a specific regionally bounded understanding of international cyberspace law that provides an alternative reading of it vis-à-vis the Western conceptualizations.Footnote 77
Where, then, does Turkey position itself within these regional schemes? In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s disintegration in the early 1990s, Turkey’s renewed engagement in the Caucasus and Central Asia was, especially in its initial stages, broadly welcomed by the West.Footnote 78 This reception was largely shaped by the possible projection of the so-called “Turkish model” – a synthesis of secular democratic governance and liberal economic policy – onto normative developments in post-Soviet Central Asia.Footnote 79 Such projection could, at least nominally, advance liberal international legal agendas in the region by promoting Western-led legal modernization projects.Footnote 80 Yet, Turkey’s regional role cannot be separated from its own distinct normative preferences, which, as Akbulut and Karakaş argue, have shifted since the 2013 Gezi Park protests. This shift reflects Turkey’s disengagement from certain norms associated with Western conceptions of international law, particularly in the field of human rights, while preserving strategic interest in other domains.Footnote 81 Institutions – most notably the OTS – play a central role in mediating this process of Turkey’s involvement in Central Asian geopolitics.
II. From kinship to the OTS
The historical relationship between Turkey – and, before it, the Ottoman Empire – and Central Asia, as well as other Muslim-populated territories of the Russian Empire, including Azerbaijan, long predates the emergence of the Central Asian republics as independent subjects of international law after 1991.Footnote 82 This relationship was not merely cultural or political but also legally significant. By the late nineteenth century, the Central Asian khanates, including Bukhara and Khiva, had largely come under the suzerainty of the Russian Empire. As a result, the Ottoman authorities had to confront a specific legal question: whether individuals originating from these khanates and residing or working within Ottoman jurisdiction should be treated as Russian nationals and therefore entitled to the protections of the capitulations regime, including exemption from the application of Ottoman Islamic law.Footnote 83 According to legal advisers in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, the answer was negative. Protectorates such as Bukhara, they argued, were semi-sovereign entities, and their subjects were therefore not entitled to European capitulatory privileges or protections.Footnote 84 Lâle Can has argued that this position should not be read simply as an expression of Ottoman universalism or pan-Turkic kinship.Footnote 85 Instead, this ought to demonstrate that Central Asia figured in Ottoman legal reasoning as a distinct legal-political space, rather than merely as another territory under Russian sovereignty. It thereby illustrates the longer historical process through which cultural and linguistic affinities between Turkey and Central Asia acquired legal and political significance.Footnote 86
During the Soviet period, relations between the Azerbaijani and Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics, on the one hand, and the Republic of Turkey, on the other, remained limited, particularly after Turkey’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Formal diplomatic and institutional engagement was largely absent, although indirect cultural and individual-level linkages persisted.Footnote 87 Particularly during the Soviet era, Turkey appeared to many Central Asian Turks and Azerbaijanis as the only independent political entity with which they could identify ethnically, culturally, and linguistically.Footnote 88
This symbolic connection acquired renewed political and legal significance after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the newly independent Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan entered the international legal order as sovereign states. Turkey was one of the first states to recognize their independence and rapidly moved to deepen bilateral relations with them.Footnote 89 Since the early 1990s, Turkey has concluded numerous bilateral agreements with all these states, progressively institutionalizing its regional engagement.Footnote 90 With the establishment of the OTS, this co-operation has deepened further through strategic partnership agreements, underscoring the role of Turkic solidarity in advancing Eurasian connectivity – through its emphasis on the Middle Corridor – and regional security frameworks.Footnote 91
The first major institutional step came in 1992, when Turkey convened the inaugural Summit of the Heads of State of Turkic-Speaking Countries in Ankara.Footnote 92 The summit brought together the leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. It was conceived not merely as a forum for political dialogue but also as a foundation for deeper economic and institutional co-operation among Turkic-speaking states, including potential market integration within the broader framework of the multilateral trading system.Footnote 93
A. OTS: its international legal standing
Following that development, a series of high-level summits culminated in the adoption of the Nakhchivan Agreement in 2009, which formally established the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States – commonly known as the Turkic Council.Footnote 94 Conceived as a multilateral institutional framework, the Council was designed – through a set of institutional arrangements – to promote the gradual consolidation and deepening of bilateral and multilateral co-operation among Turkic-speaking states across a wide spectrum of policy domains.Footnote 95
In 2021, at the Eighth Summit of Heads of State, the organisation underwent a significant institutional transformation, officially adopting – by declaration – the name “Organization of Turkic States”.Footnote 96 There is, however, a compelling legal caveat here. Article 21 of the Nakhchivan Agreement provides that changes to the Agreement, including to its name – addressed in Article 1 – may be effected through separate protocols that form an integral part of the constituent instrument.Footnote 97 Publicly available information, however, does not clearly indicate that such a protocol was adopted in connection with the 2021 renaming. From a legal perspective, the name change thus appears to have been implemented through a declaration rather than by formal amendment of the Nakhchivan Agreement.Footnote 98 This practice raises a broader question concerning the relationship between OTS declarations and the organisation’s legal identity and decision-making processes. Particularly, this episode suggests that OTS declarations cannot be reduced to mere political statements. Rather, they may function as vehicles through which Member States articulate a common intention to produce institutional consequences with legal significance.Footnote 99 The reliance on declarations to effectuate substantial organisational changes – most notably the renaming of the Organization – therefore indicates that, within the OTS framework, declaratory instruments may acquire a quasi-normative character, even in the absence of formal amendment procedures under the constituent treaty.Footnote 100
This is, however, not the only legally intriguing feature of the OTS. The current full members of the OTS are Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. Turkmenistan, Hungary, and the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) hold observer status. Article 16 of the Nakhchivan Agreement provides for observer participation and authorizes the granting of observer status to “states, international organisations, and international fora”.Footnote 101 Hungary’s and Turkmenistan’s observer status are uncontroversial on this basis. The TRNC’s observer status, however, raises the question of whether it is being treated as a “state” or as an “international forum” within the meaning of Article 16. It is noteworthy that, among OTS members, only Turkey formally recognizes the TRNC as an independent state. Doctrinal orthodoxy has long held that membership in international organisations is generally limited to subjects of international law endowed with treaty-making capacity – without which ratification of a constituent instrument is impossible – and historically such membership has overwhelmingly been limited to states.Footnote 102 That orthodoxy has nonetheless evolved as non-state participation in international organisations has expanded through modalities such as associate membership, observer status, and other forms of institutionalized engagement.Footnote 103
The OTS occupies a particularly interesting position in this respect. Turkish legal scholarship has, at times, advanced the view that the TRNC satisfies relevant criteria for participation in the OTS under international law.Footnote 104 Related arguments have also been made – though more rarely in recent years – that sub-state regions inhabited by Turkic-speaking populations (including certain federal subjects of the Russian Federation, like Altai) could, in principle, qualify for participation.Footnote 105 These positions underscore the extent to which the OTS has been oriented towards Turkic linguistic and cultural affiliation rather than exclusive reliance on statehood as a membership criterion,Footnote 106 even if more expansive understandings of eligibility appear to have receded following the organisation’s institutional renaming in 2021.Footnote 107
In this respect, the TRNC is most plausibly treated as an “international forum” rather than as a “state”, especially given Jure Vidmar’s observation that “membership of international organizations should not be seen as confirmation of statehood … [s]tatehood is a substantive question of international legal status, while membership of international organizations is a procedural matter concerning the rules of a particular organization”.Footnote 108 At the same time, the OTS’ cultural-civilizational definition of membership and participation arguably does more than merely reaffirm the doctrinal point that participation does not constitute statehood. As will be demonstrated, the TRNC’s observer status within the OTS is not separated from contestation over its political status. On the contrary, its participation has generated, and continues to generate, politically charged discussions of the Cyprus problem within the Organization, from an international legal point of view.Footnote 109
This practice illustrates how a regional organisation operating within a geopolitically tense environment can institutionalize forms of participation that are politically meaningful and normatively consequential notwithstanding the entity’s non-recognition at the universal level. Non-recognition, in this respect, does not, of course, preclude all forms of administrative or technical co-operation between states; yet it does “preclude intergovernmental cooperation, i.e., cooperation at ministerial level, as well as cooperation that requires the existence of diplomatic relations”.Footnote 110 The TRNC’s observer status does not amount to formal intergovernmental co-operation, still less to the establishment of diplomatic relations. It nevertheless cannot be dismissed as a matter of mere administrative arrangement. At the declaratory level, it signals an acknowledgement by the OTS that the factual situation on the island forms part of the political and legal context within which any prospective settlement of the Cyprus question must be assessed.Footnote 111 That issue, as will be shown, becomes a focal point for the selective invocation and application of international law within the Organization.
B. OTS: institutional dimension
In institutional terms, the OTS is best understood as a classical intergovernmental organisation. It remains premised on state sovereignty and possesses neither supranational authority nor autonomous binding decision-making powers. Its principal organs – the Council of Heads of State, the Council of Foreign Ministers, and the Council of Elders –Footnote 112 function primarily as fora for intergovernmental coordination and political consultation among the Member States.Footnote 113 Alongside these core organs, the OTS operates through a range of technical committees, councils, and working groups covering areas such as culture, trade, finance, education, transport, and security.Footnote 114
The broader Turkic co-operation framework also includes several closely affiliated institutions. These include the International Organization of Turkic Culture, the Union of Turkic Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Turkic Investment Fund, the Turkic Academy, and the TURKPA.Footnote 115 Some of these bodies are formally distinct from the OTS, but they participate in the wider institutional framework through which Turkic co-operation is articulated. TURKPA is especially relevant for the present article because, although institutionally autonomous, it often reproduces legal and political language similar to that found in OTS declarations. This makes it useful evidence of how particular legal narratives circulate across the broader Turkic institutional framework.Footnote 116
The OTS is, in this respect, an institutionally modest organisation. It does not approximate the supranational model of the European Union, nor does it function as a Chapter VIII regional arrangement for the purposes of collective security under the UN Charter,Footnote 117 or as a regional trade arrangement within the meaning of Article XXIV of the GATT.Footnote 118 Its legal and political significance lies elsewhere: in its cultural and linguistic foundations. The Organization and its affiliated bodies seek to cultivate a common Turkic identity through diverse initiatives. The activities of the Turkic Academy and the Common Alphabet Committee are particularly illustrative in this regard.Footnote 119 This cultural-linguistic dimension distinguishes the OTS from many other Eurasian regional organisations. While the CIS, CSTO, EAEU, and SCO are organised primarily around post-Soviet continuity, security governance, border delimitation, or economic integration, the OTS is structured around the idiom of Turkic identity.
That specificity also impacts how the OTS approaches international law generally.Footnote 120 This is particularly visible in relation to territorial disputes. The cases of Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus demonstrate how the OTS mobilizes legal concepts such as territorial integrity, occupation, self-determination, non-recognition, political equality, and factual realities in selective and geopolitically motivated ways. These two cases therefore provide the clearest tests of the Organization’s geojurisprudential significance.Footnote 121
III. Geojurisprudence in the practice of OTS: the cases of Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus
The OTS has become a relevant forum for the regional legal narration of contested territorial conflicts. Its declarations and affiliated institutional statements do not amount to formal lawmaking, nor do they establish a binding regional doctrine of territorial recovery. They do, however, reveal how legal concepts may be invoked differently across comparable disputes. This is particularly visible in the contrast between Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus. The former illustrates how OTS’ language has supported Azerbaijan’s claim to territorial restoration. The latter shows how the Organization has instead emphasized existing realities on the island and the rights of Turkish Cypriots. Read together, the two cases suggest that OTS practice reflects selective regional legal justification rather than a consistent doctrine of territorial recovery.
A. From peaceful settlement to permissive war: the Nagorno-Karabakh case
The 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan reignited a longstanding debate in jus ad bellum: is war for territorial recovery permissible under modern international law?Footnote 122 This question has generated renewed interest among international legal scholars, particularly given its empirical relevance vis-à-vis other territorial conflicts such as Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Northern Cyprus.
This question has divided international lawyers. Akande and Tzanakopoulos have argued that where occupation follows an unlawful armed attack, the occupation may be understood as a continuing armed attack, so that the injured state does not necessarily lose its right to self-defence merely because time has passed.Footnote 123 Ruys and Silvestre, by contrast, argue that the immediacy requirement and the prohibition on using force to settle territorial disputes prevent a state from invoking self-defence to recover territory that has been peacefully administered by another entity for a prolonged period.Footnote 124 Eliav Lieblich, joining this discussion and providing arguments on the nexus between the moral and doctrinal-legal aspect of the tension between permissive and restrictive approaches, concludes that “international lawyers engaging in the debate regarding wars of recovery should be reflective and explicit on the underlying principles that they are following”.Footnote 125
Yet, few scholars have meaningfully examined the geojurisprudence of territorial conflicts in which the war of recovery doctrine may be invoked and justified. Existing debates have tended to remain within the confines of ostensibly apolitical doctrinal analysis or, at most, philosophical and moral argumentation, including arguments framed in the language of human rights. They have paid insufficient attention to the geo-legal processes through which the use of force for territorial recovery is legitimated: the fora in which such legitimation occurs and the vocabularies through which it is articulated. This omission is particularly striking given that the central tension in such cases – between secessionist claims and territorial integrity – is inherently geopolitical and historically situated.Footnote 126 Remarkably, in discussions of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, many legal scholars fail to address, let alone substantively analyze, the role of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, the very institutional mechanism formally mandated to mediate this conflict in peaceful terms.Footnote 127 The Minsk Group, although possessing a political mandate and being legally non-binding,Footnote 128 nevertheless affirmed the status quo established after the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and reflected the impermissibility of resolving the conflict through the use of armed force, as underscored by the Madrid Principles of the OSCE Minsk Group.Footnote 129 The pertinent question in this context is whether the war of recovery doctrine can be legitimately invoked when institutional mechanisms exist to uphold the status quo and facilitate the peaceful resolution of conflicts. And what role, if any, do international and regional institutions play in shaping permissible boundaries of such a doctrine?Footnote 130
Universal bodies are not necessarily well placed to legitimate the war of recovery doctrine. The UNSC, for example, has often responded to territorial conflicts and occupations by endorsing ceasefires, interim arrangements, and open-ended political processes, thereby privileging the preservation of peace and stability over the resumption of active hostilities.Footnote 131 Such practice tends to produce a restrictive doctrinal posture towards the permissibility of recovering territory through the use of force. Given this structural ambivalence at the universal level, it is unsurprising, from a geojurisprudential perspective, that legal arguments in favour of the use of force to retake occupied territory are more readily articulated and normalized in regional platforms than in fora requiring broader, or universal, consensus. Regional organisations typically operate with narrower and more politically aligned memberships. They may therefore provide a more permissive institutional setting for the endorsement or normalization of such doctrines, even where those doctrines remain contested under general international law.
The OTS, in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, served precisely this function by providing a regional framework through which the war of recovery doctrine has been effectively legitimised. The OTS and its affiliated institutions have consistently adopted a specific stance on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. For example, in December 2022, when a group of eco-activists blocked the Lachin Corridor – the sole road connecting Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh – Armenia submitted a request to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for provisional measures, citing the terms of the November 2020 trilateral statement between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, which stipulated that the “corridor (5 km wide) … will ensure the communication between Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenia …”.Footnote 132 In February 2023, the ICJ issued a provisional measure ordering that “Azerbaijan shall … take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions”.Footnote 133 Even if the terms of provisional measures are binding over the parties,Footnote 134 Azerbaijan continued its blockade of the Lachin Corridor. Following the Court’s indication of the provisional measure, in April 2023 TURKPA – a sister organisation of OTS – issued a declaration where it held that the demands of Azerbaijani eco-activists were legitimate and that Lachin Corridor could be used only for humanitarian purposes,Footnote 135 allegedly restricting the interpretation by the Court that secured wider rights.
The OTS’s most significant intervention in this context, however, lay in its declaratory support for a war of recovery doctrine which justifies territorial recovery through use of armed force under self-defence. The chronology of declarations adopted by the OTS’ main political body indicates how that justificatory pattern has evolved over time. First, between 2009 and 2012, all declarations issued by the OTS included identical pronouncements regarding the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. These statements emphasized that the Member States of the OTS
express the importance of the peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which is one of the main obstacles to lasting stability and regional co-operation, on the basis of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and inviolability of the borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and reaffirm their conviction that the resolution of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will constitute significant progress toward ensuring peace, stability, and prosperity in the Eurasian area.Footnote 136
The 2014 Bodrum Declaration, however, while retaining the core formulation concerning Azerbaijan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and inviolability of borders, omitted the reference to “peaceful” settlement and removed the broader language linking conflict resolution to peace, stability, and prosperity in Eurasia.Footnote 137 Declarations issued between 2015 and 2019 preserved the same essential structure but replaced the language of “peaceful” settlement with a call for the “earliest” resolution of the conflict.Footnote 138 This shift did not amount to an express endorsement of the use of force, nor did the OTS formally invoke the language of self-defence or articulate a legal war of recovery doctrine. It nevertheless marked a meaningful rhetorical movement away from the exclusive vocabulary of peaceful settlement. Through these declarations, the OTS Member States signalled a growing political willingness to support Azerbaijan’s claim to territorial restoration. The substitution of “peaceful” with “earliest” is therefore not merely semantic. It indicates a form of regional legal justification in which Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity was prioritized over the procedural constraints normally associated with the OSCE mediation, whose existence institutionally maintained the prohibition on the use of force. This alignment became more explicit in the post-2020 period. In the 2021 declarations, OTS Member States commended the “firm support” expressed for Azerbaijan’s “just cause to liberate its territories from military occupation”, thereby retrospectively framing Azerbaijan’s military action in the language of liberation and territorial restoration.Footnote 139
What do these semantic shifts signify from the standpoint of international law? While such declarations are formally non-binding and therefore fall outside the ambit of the fundamental principle of pacta sunt servanda,Footnote 140 they are not without legal significance, as has already been demonstrated.Footnote 141 Furthermore, as Zimmerman and Jauer observe:
even when States try to evade the rigorousness of international law generally, and international treaty law more specifically, by concluding non-legally binding MOUs, they cannot avoid that it is international law which nevertheless determines whether or not there might exist ‘secondary’ legal effects of such instruments arising under international law, their mere political character notwithstanding.Footnote 142
The legal implications of such instruments, therefore, are not confined to the doctrine of estoppel as traditionally discussed in academic scholarship.Footnote 143 More broadly, they illuminate how states interpret, approach, and selectively apply international law, while simultaneously contributing to specific state practice that may prove instrumental in the formation or consolidation of either new doctrines of international law (like that of the war of recovery doctrine) or even customary international law.Footnote 144 In this regard, regional organisations often serve as platforms for the legitimation of controversial (regional) legal doctrines,Footnote 145 even where the customary status of such regional doctrines remains contested or unsettled.Footnote 146
The Nagorno-Karabakh example, therefore, offers a substantive illustration of the geojurisprudential use of international legal norms developed earlier in the article. To test whether this use is selective, however, it is necessary to compare it with the approach of OTS Member States to a factually analogous issue of direct institutional relevance: the hypothetical invocation of a war of recovery doctrine in relation to Northern Cyprus, an observer state in the OTS.
B. The OTS between Nagorno-Karabakh’s recovery and Northern Cyprus’s occupation
While the issue of Northern Cyprus has been extensively addressed in legal scholarship and falls largely beyond the scope of this article, a fundamental question remains: is the war of recovery doctrine applicable to the Northern Cyprus situation? And if so, how does the OTS, which has granted observer status to this unrecognized entity, position itself in relation to this territorial dispute while also legitimising it in Nagorno-Karabakh case? Before turning to these questions, it is necessary to briefly outline the historical and political trajectory of the conflict to grasp the underlying factors that make this inquiry central and to avoid acontextual examination.Footnote 147
Cyprus, with a Greek Cypriot majority and a significant Turkish Cypriot minority, attained sovereignty from British colonial rule in 1960. The intercommunal relations between Cypriot Greeks and Turks were codified not only in its constitutional law but also through a series of foundational international agreements. These include the 1960 Treaty Concerning the Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus and the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee –both of which involved the United Kingdom, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus as signatories – as well as the 1960 Treaty of Alliance, concluded between Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. Following persistent intercommunal tensions, President Makarios’s 1963 constitutional amendments led to the withdrawal of Turkish Cypriots from state institutions, sparking violence and culminating in the 1964 deployment of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus and the emergence of Turkish Cypriot enclaves and a provisional administration by 1967.Footnote 148 The situation escalated after the 1974 Greek Cypriot coup and subsequent Turkish military intervention – invoked under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee – resulting in population displacements.Footnote 149 In 1975, the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was proclaimed, and ultimately the 1983 unilateral declaration of the TRNC was adopted.Footnote 150 In response to Turkey’s military intervention in Cyprus following the 1974 coup, the UNSC adopted a series of resolutions – notably Resolutions 353 and 360 – demanding an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of foreign troops, and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Cyprus.Footnote 151
Despite these calls, Turkey launched a second offensive in August 1974, further occupying the island, displacing nearly 200,000 residents, and prompting further UN condemnation, including Resolution 365, which reiterated the demand for withdrawal and non-interference.Footnote 152 The 1983 unilateral declaration of the TRNC was declared legally invalid by UNSC Resolutions 541 and 550, which reaffirmed the unitary character of the Republic of Cyprus and called on all states to withhold recognition from the secessionist entity.Footnote 153 Thus, from the perspective of international law, Turkish presence in Northern Cyprus – where Turkey exercises effective control –Footnote 154 is regarded as a violation of international law.Footnote 155 Accordingly, the relevance of the war of recovery doctrine arises, even though the Republic of Cyprus has not, to date, asserted the right to use force to reclaim control over the territory of Northern Cyprus.Footnote 156 Scholars such as Lieblich, Ruys, and Silvestre have argued that the war of recovery doctrine could plausibly be invoked in the case of Northern Cyprus, particularly if one adopts a permissive interpretation.Footnote 157 This raises the important question: what would be the position of the international community and regional organisations – most notably the OTS – on such a scenario?
As claimed, among all OTS Member States and globally, Turkey remains the only country that formally recognizes the TRNC and actively promotes broader recognition of the TRNC among the other OTS members. The 2022 Samarkand Summit, at which the TRNC was granted observer status,Footnote 158 has widely been interpreted as a tacit endorsement of de facto recognition by Central Asian states, prompting criticism from Western actors who view this move as incompatible with UNSC Resolutions 541 and 550.Footnote 159 However, political developments shifted dramatically after 2024, when Uzbekistan, followed by Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, accredited ambassadors to the Republic of Cyprus.Footnote 160 These developments culminated in April 2025, during the first EU-Central Asia Summit, when the Central Asian states publicly affirmed their respect for UNSC Resolutions 541 and 550 and committed to upholding these resolutions in all regional co-operation frameworks.Footnote 161 Yet, only a month later, at the May 2025 OTS informal summit, Central Asian states reiterated that any resolution to the Cyprus issue should be based on “existing realities on the island” and must respect the “inherent rights of Turkish Cypriots”. This position was further reinforced by the granting of observer status to the TRNC in the Turkic Academy, an international organisation affiliated with the OTS.Footnote 162
As with Nagorno-Karabakh, OTS declarations concerning Northern Cyprus have evolved both semantically and substantively over time. However, the contrast is striking: while OTS declarations increasingly moved towards endorsing the permissive use of force in Azerbaijan’s favour, declarations on the Cyprus issue have emphasized status quo acceptance rather than conflict resolution through a war of recovery. From 2013 to 2017, OTS declarations on the Cyprus issue called for conflict resolution under UN auspices and recognized the equality of both communities.Footnote 163 In 2018, however, a significant shift occurred. For the first time, OTS declarations dropped references to the UN and instead advocated for a settlement reflecting the “factual situation on the ground”.Footnote 164 This language has since persisted, including in the May 2025 Budapest declaration following the EU-Central Asia Summit.Footnote 165
This evolution places OTS Member States in a position of in-betweenness. On the one hand, they tacitly legitimise the TRNC through symbolic gestures like granting observer status, which indirectly aligns with Turkish-supported secessionist claims. On the other hand, they publicly affirm the territorial integrity of the Republic of Cyprus and endorse relevant UNSC resolutions. Central Asian scholar Ikboljon Qoraboyev has pointed to the region’s sensitivity to territorial integrity as a core principle of international law, especially amid Russia’s imperial ambitions, as a key reason behind this duality.Footnote 166 This also helps to explain why the same states have endorsed Azerbaijan’s territorial consolidation in Nagorno-Karabakh, as seen in previous OTS declarations.Footnote 167 However, the notion that conflicts should be resolved based on “factual situations on the ground” reflects a broader trend in authoritarian international law.Footnote 168 Under a permissive interpretation, the Republic of Cyprus could assert an extended right of self-defence and seek to reclaim the occupied north through force. Yet, such an action would both contradict the OTS’ commitment to status quo-based settlement and disregard its permissive stance on Azerbaijan’s use of force in Nagorno-Karabakh.
This contrast reveals the selective application of international law within the same institutional setting. In Nagorno-Karabakh, territorial integrity is used dynamically to support the restoration of Azerbaijan’s territorial control. In Northern Cyprus, by contrast, factual realities are used conservatively to qualify the territorial integrity claim of the internationally recognized state and to accommodate the existing situation. The same legal vocabulary is therefore rearranged according to the geopolitical alignment of each dispute. The chart below illustrates this type of selective application, reflecting the geojurisprudential turn in practice.
This comparison demonstrates that OTS practice does not articulate a coherent or generalizable doctrine of territorial recovery through permissive usage of war of recovery doctrine. Rather, it reveals the operationalization of a geojurisprudential approach to international law where legal principles are not rejected but, rather, selectively applied in accordance with regional or geopolitical alignments. This geojurisprudential selectivity operates at several levels. First, OTS Member States have used declaratory instruments to frame two structurally comparable territorial disputes in sharply different legal terms. In the Nagorno-Karabakh context, the dominant vocabulary is that of territorial integrity and subsequently restoration of lawful control. In the Northern Cyprus context, by contrast, the relevant language shifts towards existing realities. Second, this asymmetry is not confined to isolated declarations. It persists across OTS practice and evolves in line with the geopolitical trajectory of each dispute. Third, the comparison shows that the OTS does not treat “war of recovery” as a legal rule of general nature.
IV. Conclusion
This article has examined the OTS as a site of selective regional legal legitimation in a multipolar international order. Substantively, the OTS does not create binding regional international law, nor do its declarations establish a regional customary rule concerning territorial recovery. The significance of the OTS, nevertheless, lies elsewhere. Through non-binding instruments and other quasi-legal means, the Organization coordinates a legal vocabulary through which geopolitical preferences are presented in the language of international law.
The comparison between Nagorno-Karabakh and Northern Cyprus reveals this dynamic clearly. In relation to Nagorno-Karabakh, OTS declarations increasingly framed Azerbaijan’s position through the language of sovereignty and the restoration of territorial control. This, indeed, did not amount to an express legal endorsement of a right to use force, but it created a permissive regional narrative in which Azerbaijan’s recovery of territory could be understood as legally and politically justified. In relation to Northern Cyprus, however, the OTS has not generalized the same recovery logic. Instead, it has emphasized existing realities on the island, the inherent rights of Turkish Cypriots, political equality between the parties, and negotiated settlement as the basis of conflict resolution.
The result is selective application of international law in line with geojurisprudential preferences that the article has elaborated upon and operationalized under the geojurisprudential turn in international law. The broader implication of this geojurisprudential turn is that regional organisations can matter legally even where they do not make binding law. Their declarations and institutional practices may not create formal obligations, but they can affirm interpretive preferences of states and produce a regional environment in which certain positions become easier to defend while others are marginalized. In this sense, the OTS illustrates how multipolar ordering contributes to the spatial fragmentation of international law where universal norms are not reupdated but repurposed, interpreted, and applied according to geopolitical preferences, impacting international law’s universalist assumptions.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the editors and peer reviewers of the Asian Journal of International Law. An earlier draft of this article was presented at the University of Zurich conference, “Ukraine and the Post-Liberal International Order after the Zeitenwende”. All errors remain the author’s own.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the SCRA Research Project No. 22rl-040.
Competing interests
None.
Artur SIMONYAN is a postdoctoral researcher at IOS Regensburg, Germany. Email: artur.simonyan@ios-regensburg.de, simonyanartur.law@gmail.com.
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