The economic weapon

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• ECOINT: Twentieth-Century International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization

Join Nicolas Mulder for a discussion on the rising popularity of sanctions as an economic weapon. This seminar is co-organised by the ECOINT project and the Political Economy Working Group.

In the last century, economic sanctions have gone from an ambitious peace-promoting tool of international government to a foreign policy instrument of first resort for liberal democracies. How do we account for this dramatic rise in the popularity of the economic weapon? This talk explores the entangled history of sanctions on the one hand and the history of economic & financial globalisation on the other to show how the use of economic pressure has exploited–but also shaped–the degree of interdependence in our world economy ever since the First World War.

Nicholas Mulder is Assistant Professor of History and Milstein Faculty Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale UP, 2022) and is currently working on an international history of property confiscation in the last two centuries. His writing has appeared in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere.

This seminar will take place in hybrid mode.