In the last century, economic sanctions have moved from the status of an ambitious peace-promoting tool to a first resort foreign policy instrument for liberal democracies. With this shift in strategic use and status, economic sanctions have come to dominate the landscape of world politics today. But how do we account for this dramatic rise in the popularity of the economic weapon?

Drawing from his recent book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022), Nicholas Mulder will explore how economic sanctions have in fact been modeled and operate as a technique of warfare. Pointing to the entangled histories of sanctions, financial globalization, and liberal internationalism, he sheds new light on how the application of economic pressure has exploited as well as shaped global economic interdependence since the First World War.

SPEAKER

Nicholas Mulder is Assistant Professor of History and Milstein Faculty Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale UP, 2022) and is currently working on an international history of property confiscation in the last two centuries. His writing has appeared in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere.

DISCUSSANT:

Farzan Sabet, Researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research

MODERATOR:

Grégoire Mallard, Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Director of Research at the Geneva Graduate Institute