
Dr Eva Nanopoulos
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, January 2024 - April 2024
Home institution: Queen Mary, University of London
Eva Nanopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, where she teaches various courses on international human rights law, as well as legal theory. Her work draws on decolonial, feminist, and materialist theories to develop historically informed and potentially transformative approaches to our understanding of public law, broadly construed to include EU law, international law, and constitutional law. She is particularly interested in how binaries such as war/peace, economic/political, mind/body find expression in law and their role in the reproduction of global capitalism. She is author of The Juridification of Individual Sanctions and the Politics of EU Law (Hart, 2020) and co-edited The Crisis Behind the Euro-Crisis: The Euro-Crisis as a Multi-Dimensional Systemic Crisis of the EU (CUP, 2019) and Capitalist States and Marxist State Theory (Palgrave, 2023). She is the co-director of the Queen Mary Centre of Law and Society in a Global Context, as part of which she founded the ‘capital and power’ research stream and co-founded the ‘Law and Marxism’ series. She is also a member of the editorial collective @legalform, a forum for Marxist analysis and critique, and sat as juror on the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Unilateral Coercive Measures. From January 2024, she will hold a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on her new book, A Decolonial Legal History of Sanctions.
Project Title: A Decolonial Legal History of Sanctions
What are known as ‘economic sanctions’ are generally treated as coercive but ultimately ‘peaceful’ (i.e., non-violent) instruments by international law. As a result, sanctions are frequently deployed by states and other international actors during ‘peace-time’ to pursue a variety of objectives. Yet, the legal concept and practice of ‘peaceful sanctions’ is ridden with contradictions. Prior to the twentieth century, international law viewed sanctions as a violent form of warfare that is illegal outside active hostilities. Conceptually, they conflict with the dominant liberal ideology that only the free market and economic freedom can deliver peace. And in practice, many sanctions are cast in official legal and political discourse as instances of aggression or economic warfare. The project’s premise is that understanding the legal evolution and contemporary status of sanctions requires such contradictions to be taken seriously as symptoms of the entangled histories of international law, capitalism, and imperialism.
Against this background, the project will be the first a) to historicise and theorise the emergence ‘economic’ coercion as an independence source of violence that no longer relies exclusively on military force; b) to draw the connections between the history of sanctions under international law and the histories of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism; c) to understand the role of international law in enabling and legitimising new forms of non-military imperial violence.