Jusic, Asim2025-04-042025-04-042025„Review of European and Comparative Law”, 2025, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 91-114.2545-384Xhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/8590Secessions are costly. That does not mean that counter-secessions more generally, and international judicial opinions as tools of counter-secession specifically, are costless. The trajectory of the International Court of Justice’s 2010 Advisory Opinion (Opinion) on Kosovo’s declaration of independence is a case in point. Initially deemed as not unfavorable to Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, over time, the Opinion proved a useful counter-secession tool for the opponents of Kosovo’s independence. The current structure of the international legal system and the dynamics of power politics facilitated leveraging the Opinion as a mechanism of counter-secession efforts. It is shown that not even the sponsorship of a secessionist state such as Kosovo by an individual dominant power like the United States can override the structural impediment to recognizing new states: the absence of coherent norms on state recognition in international law. Moreover, the support of powers such as Russia and China has meant that Serbia, as a counter-secessionist state, could use the Opinion to sustain the lack of international consensus on Kosovo’s independence, engage in a campaign for Kosovo’s derecognition, and extract concessions from Kosovo’s main independence sponsors. Serbia’s use of the Opinion as a tool for counter-secession has proven costly, however, as its sovereignty has become beholden to the whims of great power politics in a similar way to which Kosovo is indebted to the main sponsors of its independence.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/International Court of JusticeKosovosecessionrecognitionderecognitioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/article10.31743/recl.17908