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Eva Nanopoulos, The Juridification of Individual Sanctions and the Politics of EU Law, Hart, 2020, ISBN 9781509909797, £72.00 (hb)
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. 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’. 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’. 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,...