The Imperialist Anatomy of Sanctions

Imperialism has always been met by resistance, and that resistance has in turn always been met by discipline. Like resistance to colonial rule in the age of empire, resistance to the contemporary neo-imperial ordering is met with disciplinary mechanisms imposed by those who reap the rewards of this ordering. Today unilateral economic sanctions serve as an efficient and therefore frequently used disciplinary mechanism against states that seek to challenge their peripheral status within the global order. Indeed, the U.S.’ prolific deployment of economic sanctions impacts a significant percentage of the world’s population. While touted as a humane alternative to warfare, their repercussions can be, and often are, more devastating than armed conflicts. How they can cause such devastation is only understood in the context of the debt-based imperialism that structures the global political economy today, which requires states to have consistent access to dollar-based financial capital or risk collapse. The United States and, to a lesser extent, the European Union have leveraged their power within this structure to ensure that formerly colonized states remain subjugated and vulnerable to dispossession even after political decolonization. Conventional scholarly analysis of international law has long deemed such sanctions to be lawful. Even as critical jurists have, in recent years, endeavored to identify international law constraints on the deployment of sanctions, their efforts have yielded limited results. What all these analyses overlook is an understanding of international law as it was transformed by decolonization. Anticolonial resistance movements of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s foresaw how former colonizing powers and their settler states, like the United States, would attempt to retain imperial control over the Third World even after political decolonization. Accordingly, once they politically decolonized and gained the ability to influence lawmaking in the U.N. General Assembly—what I refer to as “anticolonial lawmaking”—these anticolonial movements formulated a comprehensive right of self-determination that would directly confront imperialism in all its forms. One aspect of this right, its non-domination aspect, prohibits the economic sanctions that the U.S./EU deploy against the formerly colonized world. What this Article adds to the long-held debates on the use and legality of sanctions is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a political-economic analysis of the use of sanctions, compelled by the legacy of anticolonial resistance movements’ analysis of the imperialist world order. This analysis elucidates how and why imperialism persists today, thereby revealing the inherently disciplinary nature of U.S./EU-imposed sanctions against formerly colonized states in this context. Second, this Article recovers the immense efforts borne of transnational solidarity among anticolonial resistance movements during the era of decolonization. These efforts aimed to reshape international law to shield against the continual exploitation and ongoing plundering of their peoples. By moving out of an oft-used frame of human rights into the anti-imperial analysis that these movements brought to international fora, we can recognize how their efforts transformed international law expressly to undermine imperialism and, consequently, designate such measures illegal.