Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This study examines the persistent objector doctrine in customary international law from the perspective of the limits of state consent and systemic stability. It begins from the tension between the ability of customary international law to generate binding rules without express consent and the principle of sovereign equality. Within this framework, the study reads the persistent objector doctrine not as a sovereign right, but as a structural mechanism that narrows the scope of consent and seeks to preserve normative stability. Accordingly, the doctrine cannot be reduced solely to the question of whether an objection is raised in a timely manner; it also produces systemic consequences by providing grounds for competing claims regarding the bindingness, scope, or regional applicability of settled norms. To this end, the study examines the Cod Wars, the South China Sea, and the Aegean dispute, showing that delayed objections erode normative expectations, while early and sustained objection may in some cases entrench the dispute. It concludes that a narrow and restrictive interpretation of the persistent objector doctrine is not incompatible with the principle of sovereign equality; on the contrary, it is necessary for preserving predictability in a decentralised legal order. On this basis, the study treats the doctrine’s near-complete failure to succeed on its own not as a weakness but as the question to be explained, shifting the inquiry from “does the doctrine work?” to “under what conditions should an objection be regarded as legally persuasive?”</p>