The Power of Economic Sanctions

Dr Jessica Whyte (UNSW)

Tuesday 9 July 2024, 6pm-7:30pm - Forum Theatre, Arts West, University of Melbourne Parkville campus

In a context in which economic coercion is becoming ever-more central to geopolitical conflict, there is a pressing need to examine the long-suppressed question of economic power. In the wake of the Cold War, economic power was disavowed under the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology that treated the world market as a site of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations. At the same time, a proliferation of economic sanctions reshaped economic relations and stifled the supposed independence and economic development of much of the post-colonial world.

Economic and financial sanction are both enabled by and exacerbate the deeply unequal integration of the post-colonial world economy that is the legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism. They leverage the indebtedness and dependence of countries of the Global South and the global centrality of the US dollar to coerce states and societies. The results of such economic coercion can be devastating, but the abstract mechanisms through which it operates have made it difficult to identify causation or even adequately conceptualise the form of power that is wielded in sanctions strategies.

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. What, then, is economic coercion? How is economic power mobilised in international relations and in warfare? How can we best understand a form of power that deliberately degrades the infrastructure that sustains biological life? In this public lecture, Dr Jessica Whyte will situate economic sanctions on a continuum that stretches from the overt use of military force to the everyday capitalist coercion that Karl Marx called the “mute compulsion of economic relations.

This public lecture will be delivered as part of the inaugural Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School, presented by the Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM).

Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history, and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism, and militarism. Her work has been published in a range of fora including Contemporary Political Theory; Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly, and Theory and Event. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY 2013), and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). She is an editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Her current project is on the development of economic sanctions after the Cold War.