When: Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 1:00 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: Room 303, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Workshop sponsored by the Queen Mary Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and organised by Dr Eva Nanopoulos, Queen Mary University and Dr Helyeh Doutaghi, Associate Research Scholar, Yale Law School.
This workshop is based on a special issue, ‘Economic Sanctions and Order-Making: Towards a New Approach’ co-edited by Helyeh Doutaghi and Eva Nanopoulos due to appear in Middle Eastern Critique. Drawing from non-European perspectives, particularly West Asian perspectives, and heterodox methodologies, the special issue has two broad aims: first, to challenge dominant assumptions about and conceptions of economic sanctions; and second, to promote new critical ways for understanding sanctions and their place with the global capitalist order as a system of economic exploitation, colonial and imperial domination and inter-imperial competition structured along racialized, gendered, and national lines.
This informal workshop will offer some of the contributors to the special issue an early opportunity to discuss their preliminary ideas and/or contribution. Each panellist will speak for around 5-15min followed by discussion.
1:00- 1:20pm: Welcome and Introduction by the Editors
1:20-2:50pm: What Order? Sanctions, Capitalism, Imperialism and Colonialism
The proliferation of sanctions was accompanied by a sharp increase in scholarship about sanctions. With some exceptions, however, the terms of the debates have remained largely the same. One, more policy-orientated, approach has focused on the effectiveness of sanctions i.e., on whether sanctions ‘work. The other, more critical, has centred their humanitarian impact, including their dramatic consequences for human rights. Both, however, often rely on positivist approaches and methodologies that take sanctions at face value, leaving their role within global structures of exploitation, domination, and oppression uninterrogated. The panel seeks to recover such connections. Moving beyond the sanctions’ formal/stated aims, contributors instead seek to historicise and contextualise the imposition of sanctions and their role in broader projects of order-making, from the US’ quest for global imperial domination to Israel’s settler colonial project.
2:50-3:00pm: Break
3:00-4:30pm: Whose Order? Sanctions, Rivalries, and Struggles
Order-making is never a stable process and is traversed by the contradictions, competition between geopolitical and/or imperial rivals and struggles that shape our global social totality. The panel will broadly examine the way in which economic sanctions are similarly shaped by, but also constitutive of, such relations, providing a site where different groups compete in the articulation and realisation of alternatives conceptions and forms of order-making.
4:30-4:40pm: Break
4:40-6:00pm: What ‘Economic Sanctions?’ Beyond Conceptual Fetishism
The term ‘economic sanctions’ is largely a term of art. It has no recognisable legal status and different disciplines and scholars offer different topologies of what counts or does not fall within that category. The term ‘economic sanctions’, moreover, sits alongside myriad other terms that often refer to similar phenomena, such as ‘economic statecraft’ or ‘economic coercion’. Nonetheless, certain practices have consistently remained outside the purview of ‘economic sanctions’, which this panels aims to ‘recover’ by looking at measures or areas that have not been traditionally considered as economic sanctions, as well as measures that are supposedly more benign ‘new’ forms of law enforcement against human rights violators and other lawbreakers.