A new open-access article titled “International Law, Security, and Sanctions: A Decolonial Perspective on the Transnational Legal Order of Sanctions”, by Grégoire Mallard and Jin Sun, has been published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. 

This article reviews recent literature on sanctions from various fields, including international law, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history. It analyzes the evolution of sanctions through different decades, highlighting the shift from comprehensive sanctions in the 1990s to targeted sanctions in the 2000s and the focus on sanctions enforcement in the 2010s. The article also examines the infrastructural materiality of sanctions in the digital economy and the involvement of private actors in policing their implementation. Finally, it calls for a decolonization of sanctions research, urging scholars to question the colonial origins of sanctions as a tool of world-making. One key aspect of this decolonization process is to center the perspective of those who are most affected by sanctions and further reflect on the broad change in processes of norms creation and rules monitoring in transnational governance. 

This article is part of the ERC-funded project “Bombs, Banks and Sanctions”. 
You can read the full article here.