Economic Warfare: The Unregulated War

Economic warfare is no longer the preserve of states. Rising individual wealth and widely available technology have put its means within reach of ultra-wealthy individuals, multinational corporations, private military and security companies and non-state actors, and have left the developed North, which has most to lose, correspondingly exposed. United Kingdom law addresses the resulting conduct only in fragments. This dissertation argues that those fragments should be consolidated into a single statute, and sets out what it would have to contain. It begins with definition, distinguishing economic warfare from warfare as conventionally understood and identifying the actors the existing categories fail to reach. PMSCs are the clearest case: Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Mercenary Convention define mercenaries too narrowly to capture how such companies now operate. Case studies of the extractive industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the oil industry in Nigeria and the arms trade in Yemen supply the evidence. It then tests the instruments presently doing the work—principally the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 and the United States' Sergei Magnitsky Act, with its United Kingdom and European Union analogues—and finds each drawn for a narrower problem than the one it faces, with jurisdictional reach the recurring weakness. Cyber-economic aggression falls between them; indirect perpetrators and funding sources fall outside them. The dissertation proposes the UK Economic Warfare Prevention and Response Act: mandatory incident reporting within defined time frames, a centralised cyber-incident database, penalties for non-compliance, support, public education and provision for international collaboration. It also supplies a rapid decision structure for pre-emptive measures and, where international law independently permits it, military action. The classification problem is now live rather than hypothetical: the United Nations Security Council has held its first open debate devoted to cybersecurity as a matter of international peace and security, and published State positions recognise that a cyber operation may, according to its scale and effects, constitute a use of force or an armed attack. It closes against its own proposal, setting out where broad definitions, jurisdictional complexity, procedural safeguards and the pace of technological change would strain it. Publication edition, revised October 2026; not yet peer reviewed.