Economic Sanctions & TWAIL – LPE Project

Weapons Against the Weak

James Brandt — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post concludes our symposium on economic sanctions and TWAIL, presented in partnership with the Yale Journal of International Law. ** ** ** Sanctions are best understood as an instrument in the postcolonial arsenal of economic statecraft. This tool, the epitome of an international legal order that legitimates economic coercion, is disproportionately available to states in the Global North as...

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The Antinomies of “Peaceful” Sanctions

James Brandt — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on economic sanctions and TWAIL, presented in partnership with the Yale Journal of International Law. ** ** ** International law generally views sanctions as coercive but ultimately peaceful instruments of international politics. Indeed, despite attempts by the Global South to outlaw economic coercion during the drafting of the UN Charter, sanctions do not fall...

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Successful Failures: Economic Sanctions, Humanitarianism, and the Undoing of Post-Colonial Sovereignty

James Brandt — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on economic sanctions and TWAIL, presented in partnership with the Yale Journal of International Law. ** ** ** The psychotherapist Adam Phillips has suggested that repeated failure in doing something might actually be a success in doing something else—something that we might not want to acknowledge or articulate. This is a useful way of thinking not only about life...

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Sanctions’ New Colonizers

James Brandt — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In this moment of U.S. financial imperialism, a host of “new” colonizers have emerged, including private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against so-called terrorists, terrorist organizations, and countries designated by the U.S. State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. And just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies to destroy and deplete the colonized’s resources, these new colonizers pillage in their own modern way, leveraging and expanding the U.S. government’s imperialist reach.

The Opacity of Economic Coercion

James Brandt — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. The opaque mechanisms through which economic coercion inflicts harm have made it difficult to identify causation, let alone to prosecute its agents under international law, while the rise of neoliberalism and an individualized human rights politics have led to a turn away from the concerns with economic coercion that animated post-colonial legal activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Economic Sanctions: Where LPE Meets Third World Approaches to International Law

James Brandt — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

To what extent do the very building blocks of international law enable the weaponization of economic asymmetry? How has the expansion of the U.S. financial system shifted the locus of economic coercion in the global order? And what possibilities exist for legal analysis and advocacy to contest such forms of imperialism? To answer these and other questions about the role of law in economic sanctions, this symposium draws together insights from scholars working at the intersection of LPE and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).