In the last decade, the UNSC was forced to change its sanctioning standards (concerning targeted sanctions) due to the activism of an unexpectedly strong group of international actors: coordinated national and international courts. Courts probed their capacity to curb powerful international organizations' policy-making standards and to curtail their own governments' margin of political discretion both at the national and international level. Hence, the so-called inter-judicial coordination holds the key to unfold national and international courts' full potential as international actors.

First noticed by Benvenisti & Downs, they refer to this phenomenon as "inter-judicial coordination" or "inter-judicial cooperation", because the main concern of their remarkable research is not to scientificly define it and distinguish it from other bordering phenomenons. However, from a social scientific perspective, this is not an irrelevant nuance, since these terminologies imply different assumptions about its features. Thus, this paper tackles the pending task of properly conceptualizing this phenomenon, which is of the utmost importance in order to identify and prove its causal mechanisms.

Drawing on the insights of the previous literature concerning inter-judicial coordination, this research aims at bringing this rather legal topic into the International Relations literature. Coordinated courts become a legitimate authority to de-fragment the international order and, consequently, to modify the structural circumstances surrounding the states’ international relations and the international organizations' policy-making process. Hence, this research moves away from the traditional state-centric approach of International Relations theory in order to put meso-level actors such as national courts under the spotlight of International Relations.