In her new book, The Juridification of Individual Sanctions and the Politics of EU Law, Eva Nanopoulos provides a thoughtful discussion of the law, politics, and political economy of sanctions, focusing on their increasingly pronounced role in EU security law and policy. Nanopoulos is concerned specifically with the individualization and juridification of economic sanctions in EU law, and also in resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council. By ‘individualization’ she means ‘the shift from comprehensive sanctions imposed against states to sanctions imposed against named individuals, entities or groups’, typically involving travel bans and asset freezes.Footnote ¹ By ‘juridification’ she has in mind ‘the growing importance of law in the operation of individual sanctions, in conflict resolution and in the framing of debates concerning sanctions’.Footnote ² Dividing her book into three interrelated sections, she examines both processes, and a host of others, by considering the form, content, and context of sanctions.

Nanopoulos departs from analyses of sanctions that foreground considerations of morality, humanitarianism, and political prudence. She is interested less in questions about the legal validity or defensibility of sanctions than in their politico-economic causes and historical antecedents (she discusses the League of Nations and Cold War period, among other things). She argues that sanctions ought to be understood first and foremost as instruments of policing – instruments for fostering, managing, and reproducing capitalist relations under neoliberal conditions. Blacklisted individuals and entities are not law-breakers so much as enemies of order and good governance, latter-day pirates in an international system shot through with violence and inequality at every turn. To be the target of a sanction is to be distinguished as ‘a constitutive hostility … to the international order’.Footnote ³ To impose sanctions is to do the disciplinary work of ‘civilization’ – of full incorporation into prevailing circuits of finance capitalism.

Nanopoulos draws upon a wide range of critical and Marxian scholarship to bolster this argument, from Mark Neocleous, the security and pacification theorist, to B. S. Chimni, who has developed an ‘integrated Marxist’ theory of international law. Nanopoulos brings a wealth of knowledge to the topic of sanctions, unsettling conventional dichotomies between war and peace, security and insecurity, domestic and international, and change and continuity (in regard to relevant legal rules). This makes for a wide-ranging and often impassioned book of direct relevance to contemporary debates about law and economic coercion, one that should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic. As with all books, though, some aspects could benefit from further elaboration.

First, some readers might expect somewhat closer engagement with the United States’ role in the development, legitimation, and enforcement of sanctions regimes. Nanopoulos recognizes that ‘the emergence and popularity of individual sanctions at the UN and EU level can be seen partly as an internationalisation of American policy and practice’,Footnote ⁴ devoting a brief section of the book to the US wars on communism, drugs, and terror.Footnote ⁵ She also notes that China and Russia – veto-bearing Security Council members like the United States – have historically preferred to leverage their energy resources and power over trading partners rather than impose sanctions. Moscow’s recent blacklisting of foreign officials (including EU officials ^{Footnote 6} ) is an exception to this rule, and one that has been taken largely in retaliation against US and EU sanctions following Crimea’s annexation. By contrast, as she observes, the United States has chosen to craft and enforce sanctions against a wide range of different adversaries, state and non-state alike.Footnote ⁷ Yet Nanopoulos does not provide a detailed explanation of US imperialism and its role in the creation and application of EU and Security Council sanctions. This yields a somewhat limited view of the EU. Consider, for instance, the EU’s inability to salvage the Iran nuclear agreement, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, ^{Footnote 8} after the United States withdrew unilaterally in 2018. In the face of the United States’ withdrawal, which was followed by its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran, the EU and its member states were unable to continue trading with Iran, as they were obligated to do pursuant to the agreement. This was in spite of efforts to facilitate ‘legitimate trade’ through mechanisms like the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges. ^{Footnote 9} To be sure, the EU makes for a fascinating case study in regard to sanctions, given its size and geo-economic importance, not to mention its public profile as a ‘civilizing’ force that relies upon ‘soft power’ and a penchant for imposing sanctions against third parties and not merely its own members.Footnote ¹⁰ (A less persuasive reason for justifying this focus is what Nanopoulos calls ‘the fact’ that ‘the law plays a greater role at the EU level, than it does at the UN level’Footnote ¹¹ – a puzzling claim whose accuracy is never demonstrated.) Still, it seems difficult to explain EU sanctions without a systematic account of the organization’s dependence upon US power.

A second concern relates to Nanopoulos’ view that the shift from country-specific to individually tailored sanctions speaks to their ‘privatization’.Footnote ¹² Nanopoulos understands ‘privatization’ here to consist of blacklisting individuals and entities ‘not formally part of the state apparatus’, as well as the more conventional targeting of state officials.Footnote ¹³ In her view, this development is part of wider efforts to depoliticize sanctions, which are regularly presented ‘as instruments designed to realise, rather than undermine, post-colonial sovereignty’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is a thought-provoking perspective, but what remains under-explored are the broader socio-economic ramifications of such ‘smart’ sanctions. A focus on blacklisted individuals and entities ignores the wider social consequences of sanctions, which usually inflict disproportionate harm on people and institutions well beyond specified targets. Measures against banks and other financial institutions, for instance, have enormously destructive effects on trade, finance, and logistics. ^{Footnote 15} Sanctions have further resulted in the closure of bank accounts of people entirely unaffiliated with designated targets, often simply because they happen to belong to a given nationality. ^{Footnote 16} To ‘smart’ sanctions, ostensibly as part of an effort to reduce ‘humanitarian costs’,Footnote ¹⁷ is to individualize a form of economic coercion that is inherently and fundamentally incapable of being individualized.

This is closely related to a third and final point, one pertaining to the book’s relative indifference to the social conditions in which sanctions take root and function. We appreciate that the book is intended as a topological analysis of individual sanctions, not a detailed reconstruction of the concrete social circumstances in which sanctions actually operate. Nevertheless, some direct discussion of the work that sanctions do ‘on the ground’ seems to be needed, especially since cases that amplify or potentially complicate the book’s argument are noted only in passing. For instance, when Nanopoulos writes that ‘the alleged success of UN sanctions against South Africa in 1977 ignored the fact that apartheid would not have ended “without massive and sustained popular mobilization, which sanctions did not create and only modestly supplemented”’,Footnote ¹⁸ we are left wanting more information on how sanctions figured in the anti-apartheid movement and the degree to which they were responsible for its ultimate success. How, after all, do we gauge the ‘effectiveness’ of sanctions? Similarly, when she states that UN sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa ‘reflected the strength and militancy of a newly independent Third World, particularly on the African continent, which put significant pressure on the West to condemn the Apartheid regime and racial segregation more generally’,Footnote ¹⁹ we are left wondering how this happened, which conditions made it possible, and why sanctions were the chosen mechanisms around which large numbers of states and peoples rallied in these two cases. The Rhodesian and South African sanctions, imposed in 1966 and 1977 respectively, preceded the European Communities’ first sanctions in 1982 – against the Soviet Union, following the US example in response to the introduction of martial law in Poland, and also Argentina, in support of the United Kingdom during the Falklands War. They also came long before the EU first resorted to individualized sanctions in 1993 (against the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the surge in EU sanctions in the years after the 2008 financial crisis.Footnote ²⁰ So why precisely were sanctions used in the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa? And how precisely were these instruments related to the eventual successes of liberation movements in both territories?

These questions do not stand in the way of Nanopoulos’ important and far-reaching contribution to the large and growing body of literature on the law of sanctions. A vital work that offers much room for thinking about sanctions beyond the limited frameworks of human rights and humanitarianism, Juridification of Individual Sanctions and the Politics of EU Law should be consulted by scholars and students of EU and international law. It is a timely reminder that legally formalized economic coercion remains a crucial medium of imperial power, and that its modalities are regularly adapted to changing circumstances.