Eva Nanopoulos talks to us about her new book published by Bloomsbury.
The book seeks to contextualise and explain two inter-related developments: the ‘individualisation’ of sanctions i.e. the move from sanctions imposed against states to sanctions imposed against named individuals and entities; and the ‘juridification’ of sanctions i.e. the increased presence of law in the operation, contestation and framing of sanctions. In doing so, the book challenges four myths that have, taken together, contributed to ‘conventional’ and distinctively positive readings of these developments: the ‘smart sanctions myth’, according to which individual sanctions emerged out of concerns about the humanitarian impact of state sanctions; the ‘EU myth’, which assumes that sanctions imposed by the EU and other international organisations are a ‘force for good’ i.e. aim to deliver peace; the ‘legal myth’, which sees the juridification of sanctions as a process divorced from questions of power and politics; and the ‘myth of liberal peace’, which posits that peace, rather than exploitation or domination, is the focal point of international society. To overcome these myths, the book re-reads these developments in their socio-economic context and links them, not to the furtherance of peace, but to the management of the global capitalist system following formal decolonization and the consolidation of neoliberalism. In that sense, the book redescribes as much as it theorises these developments.
This is not an easy question. I suppose the honest answer is that it stems from a mixture of practical and intellectual considerations. In the acknowledgments, I explain that the book is the product of an intellectual journey. As I was finishing my PhD, I became increasingly interested in critical legal theory and Marxism. I wanted this interest to shape my research but there were practical constraints: I knew I had to obtain a book contract if I was to secure a permanent post, so I had somehow to build on my earlier work. There already was much excellent critical legal scholarship on sanctions imposed to counter international terrorism, which was the focus of my PhD, and I didn’t feel I had much to add to the debate. But engaging with this literature I noticed something of a pattern: while there was unanimous indictment of these so-called ‘terrorist blacklists’, the critique did not extend beyond this specific context. Paradoxically, this was the case even though many of the concepts that have shaped the discourse around ‘smart sanctions’– humanitarianism, precision, smartness – have been heavily criticised when deployed in the context of military force. And there it was, I was hooked, and I decided I wanted to revisit the emergence and evolution of smart sanctions building on materialist histories and theories of international law.
The book’s overall argument is twofold. First, that contemporary individual sanctions should be seen as a form of policing, not in the classic sense of law enforcement, but as tools implicated in the fabrication and management of the capitalist order in its present ‘post-colonial’ and neoliberal form. The figure of the blacklisted is thus best conceived, not as law-breaker or classical enemy, but as an ‘enemy of order’. This, as I shall argue, helps us explain not only the polyvalence of the blacklisted, but also the complexity of the sanctions landscape and contradictions in the law. Secondly, that the trend towards juridification is intimately linked to the role of law in the production of capitalist order. As such, the fact that the law plays a greater role at the EU level, than it does at the UN level, should be linked to the specific form that the relationship between law and capitalism takes in the EU.
If international sanctions can be traced to the longer-term policing function of international institutions, the specific form and content they take on today must be rooted in the specific socio-economic and political conditions of the contemporary moment (ie they must be properly historicised). The book suggested that individualised sanctions first emerged as a tool to deal with the eruption of violence in post-colonial and post-communist states in a way that minimised disruption to the global markets and was consonant with the newly acquired status of post-colonial societies as formally equal sovereign states. The UN’s police power, in other words, had to evolve to reflect the economic, legal and ideological imperatives of its time. Today, individual sanctions continue to be implicated in the policing of post-colonial societies, where they often support local ruling elites in exchange for far-reaching reforms, as well as other forms of international intervention, including peacekeeping and criminal prosecution. However, they have also gradually become entrenched and have emerged as one of the main tools by which the UNSC exercises its function of policing, suppressing threats to the global order. At times, this will involve rogue regimes who show hostility to the rules that define the political and economic global order. Increasingly, they are also deployed across state boundaries, enabling states to police the enemies of order – ‘terrorists’, human rights abusers, traffickers, illegal traders – without the cumbersome constraints of their respective criminal justice systems. Here the enduring dominance of the US is – or was until the growing dissonance over the implementation of the Iranian sanctions – perhaps most visibly on display as many of these measures can be seen as an internationalisation of the US’s financial warfare.
If there are important differences between different types of sanctions, however, they should all be seen as part of a common project of order building. This project is premised on a series of assumptions about the proper role of the state and the character of the inter-state system. If it often mobilises the language of liberal values – democratic governance, human rights, respect for the rule of law etc – a closer look also makes it difficult to tie individual sanctions to a project of liberal peace building informed by ideas of democratic peace. Far more central,it seems, are concerns about a system of well-ordered states able to secure the conditions for capital accumulation. At the economic level, this has often required far-reaching economic reforms and restructuring, designed to open up local markets. At the political level, this requires a political regime, as well as institutional structures, that are able, willing and capable of ensuring stability and order, as essential pre-conditions for private investment, competition, trust, economic growth and a flourishing global system of capitalist production. At the EU level, this project has become more pronounced with the shift to ‘resilience’ as a paradigm of security, which is likely to further disentangle sanctions from projects of democratisation and human rights protection.
The law has played a crucial role in those processes that can be traced to the symbiotic relationship between law and the construction of the capitalist order. Law has always played a vital role in constituting capitalist social relations. International law grew out of the universalisation of the capitalist mode of production and EU law emerged out of the imperative of capitalist reconstruction on the European continent after the Second World War. Here, too, the juridification of sanctions is ultimately entangled in constituting, operationalising and legitimising individual sanctions as techniques for policing the enemies of order and for setting in motion a wider set of processes designed to build a globalised political order that is suited to the demands of the increased transnationalisation of capitalism.
The greater juridification that we observe at the European level should be linked to the specific role that law has come to play in creating and sustaining the conditions for the EU’s market order. Particularly important are the legal subjectivities that EU law is producing, in which the enjoyment of constitutionally protected rights is not contingent upon notions of political belonging (such as citizenship) or other moral considerations (such as human rights) but is closely tied to market participation. Equally important to the juridification of individualsanctions is the way in which EU law seeks to maintain a strict division between the legally guarded market order and politics, thus enabling increased legal interventionism.
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The book should obviously not be read as advocating a return to more comprehensive sanctions. Nor should it be read as condoning the actions of some of those included on these blacklists. Yet, even those who remain unconvinced that there is something to be gained by looking at sanctions as an integral part of the structures that sustain global capitalism today would be hard pressed not to acknowledge the ways in which the law and practice of individual sanctions prevents us from thinking coherently about building conditions for peace and security. Individual sanctions are indeed replete with contradictions. In the case of Syria, the business elite is seen to play a crucial role in sustaining the Assad regime. In the case of Egypt, by contrast, the plea of the Egyptian people appears as the product of a ‘single ruler’s personal corruption’...When all is said and done, the law and practice of individual sanctions leave the voices of those most directly affected by chronic patterns of insecurity and violence unheard...