International Sanctions: Implementing a Biopolitical Vision of the International Order

Abstract

This article aims to examine the place of the use of economic sanctions in the liberal international order, and more specifically, the place of economic sanctions in the defence of the liberal international order against a foreign policy of a state deemed to be ‘deviant’. This article shows that the use of the term “sanction” – which implies the idea of punishment – instead of the realistic notion of coercive measure, manifests the use of a biopolitical vision of international relations – in which the actor who threatens the liberal order is similar to a threat to what it represents, to a disease. Biopolitics refers precisely to this medicalization of thinking as politization of life in international relations. Discourses on sanctions are thus constructed using a medical vocabulary that often departs from the accepted meaning of sanctions. Analysing the discourses through the lens of biopolitics allows us to question the legitimacy of the international order and what contributes to its acceptance. Moreover, such medicalization of sanctions represents one of examples of the realness of Foucault’s concept of neoliberalism as biopolitics, i.e., as the process of fragmentation of political sovereignty.