The Possible Worlds of Economic Sanctions
18 Pages Posted: 3 Dec 2022 Last revised: 24 Feb 2023
Date Written: October 21, 2022
Abstract
Any attempt to understand the future of economic statecraft is a bit like gazing into a kaleidoscope of fractured worlds, of possible futures bleeding and refracting into each other. In this symposium contribution, I reflect on what it might mean to think of today’s economic warriors as the makers of those future worlds. Worldmaking projects, in the sense used by Adom Getachew, are those which resist the “legal and material manifestations” of the existing world order, and instead posit and work toward alternative “juridical, political, and economic institutions in the international realm.” The sanctionists of interwar Europe and America, as Nicolas Mulder shows in recent work, certainly understood their project as remaking world order. So too, in their own ways, did the organizers, strikers, and industrial warriors of the early twentieth century’s labor movements, as well as the boycotters and economic warriors of the Chinese diaspora during the same period. By understanding sanctions and boycotts as engines for worldmaking, I want to suggest, we can access important descriptive and normative insights that otherwise would be obscured. But to look forward, sometimes it first helps to go back.
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