The Future of International Sanctions

The use of international sanctions by the UN Security Council has evolved since the end of the Cold War and has become deadlocked over many (although not all) current conflict situations. The G7+ informal  coalition imposing sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 appeared to emerge as an alternative multilateral sanctioning body, but the alternative is contingent on fundamental normative agreement between the US and Europe, something that cannot be taken for granted at the moment. More recently, especially over the past year, China has begun to develop a vigorous sanctions program of its own, one with extra-territorial reach, as it increasingly applies restrictive measures in response to perceived harms. From the standpoints of both those who target sanctions and those who are targeted by them, there is both a global fragmentation of restrictive measures and a significantly more complicated business and economic environment.

Bio: Thomas Biersteker is the Gasteyger Professor Honoraire at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He previously taught at Yale University, the University of Southern California, and Brown University, where he directed the Watson Institute for International Studies from 1994 until 2006.
Author, editor, or co-editor of eleven books, his next book, co-edited with Oliver Westerwinter and Kenneth Abbott is Informal Governance in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022). He is also co-editor of Targeted Sanctions: The Impacts and Effectiveness of UN Action (Cambridge, 2016), Countering the Financing of Global Terrorism (Routledge, 2008), International Law and International Relations: Bridging Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2006), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge, 2002), and State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge 1996).
His research focuses primarily on international relations, global governance, and international sanctions. In addition to providing annual sanctions training for incoming members of the UN Security Council, he is the principal developer of SanctionsApp, an interactive tool for the design and analysis of UN targeted sanctions. During the past seven years, he has consulted and drafted policy reports for the UN University’s Centre for Policy Research, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, Global Affairs Canada, the Carter Center, the Asia Pacific Leadership Network, swisspeace, Intermediate, Humanitarian Dialogue, and the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as the chair of the Social Science Research Council’s Global Security and Cooperation Committee, and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Korean Peninsula.