The genesis of this work started interestingly enough. I was invited by Scarborough College, then part of the University of Hull, to read a paper on the relation between geography and the international law of the sea. I began to research and write the paper, but noticed soon enough that far too much attention had been paid to just one aspect of the various issues identified for discussion and decided then to redress the matter and restore some balance to the project. The aspect in question dealt with the topic of dispute settlement, with particular emphasis on the difficulties attending the judicial and arbitral settlement of maritime delimitation disputes. The conference at Scarborough over, I went back to the work accumulated on dispute settlement and set upon re-examining the issues in greater detail, but once again realised that there were still a number of matters which warranted discussion at greater length, and that, importantly, these matters were not confined to maritime delimitation; indeed, they encompassed delimitation issues on land as well.

Nonetheless, I elected to focus on the problems attending the adjudication and arbitration of maritime delimitation disputes and went on to publish my work in the periodical The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals, but the fact that there was still a significant gap in the literature on related matters proved to be a strong catalyst for further investigation.