The Legislative Rationale of the Charter of the League of Arab States and Its Implications for Effective Arab Crisis Management

Abstract

This article offers a doctrinal analysis of the Charter of the League of Arab States to identify its legislative rationale and assess the consequences of that rationale for Arab crisis management. It argues that the Charter was designed in the geopolitical conditions of late colonialism and contested independence to reconcile Arab solidarity with the preservation of state sovereignty through a coordination-based, rather than supranational, institutional model. Using treaty interpretation grounded in the Charter's text, context, object and purpose, and read alongside the Alexandria Protocol, early legal commentary, subsequent institutional practice, and selective comparisons with the United Nations, the African Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the European Union, the article reconstructs the Charter's normative architecture and tests its operational effects. It shows that the Charter enables consultation, mediation, and collective political coordination, yet limits compulsory decision-making, structured implementation, and authoritative legal review. The case studies of Kuwait-Iraq (1961), Yemen (1972), Syria (2011), and Gaza (2023) demonstrate that the League performs more effectively where a crisis fits the Charter's interstate and sovereignty-protective categories, but less effectively where crises are internal, humanitarian, or politically divisive. The article therefore rejects both a purely political explanation of institutional weakness and a legal-determinist account. Political will and legal design are mutually conditioning: the Charter channels state preferences, but its operation still depends on sustained member-state support. The article concludes with a calibrated reform agenda that preserves sovereign equality while differentiating voting rules, strengthening implementation and early-warning functions, structuring dispute settlement, and establishing an Arab Court of Justice under Article 19.