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.

The article examines the concept of the civilizational state as an alternative model of political organization that emerged in the early 21st century in opposition to the nation-state paradigm. The analysis addresses two arguments advanced by Western theorists against this concept: one historical, the other methodological. The first argument, based on a progressivist logic of evolution, construes the civilizational state as a regression, a return to the pre-modern, a “descent into the archaic.” This assertion ignores the fact that every civilization contains a core set of values that acts as a foundational myth, an archetype, a “pure paradigm,” an “ideal telos,” which unfold across time and space, constantly renewing itself and providing appropriate responses to the new challenges of modernity. The second objection appeals to the restrictive Western positivist understanding of the state as a “machine of governance.” Based on this, it is concluded that the “mechanistic” function inherent to the state is incompatible with the “organismic” basis of the concept of civilization. This argument fails to account for non-Western philosophy, in which the state is conceived from an ethical perspective that has been largely lost in contemporary European thought. In non-Western political thought, the state is held responsible for realizing the common good and for safeguarding peace and harmony, and is ultimately perceived as a locus of “virtue.” The article analyzes the developmental trends of the nation-state model and identifies the factors contributing to the crisis of this model. The emergence of the civilizational-state model (notably in China, Russia, India) serves not only as a form of self-defense for these countries but also as a necessary counterbalance to the concentration of global power. These states are becoming centers of attraction for culturally and historically similar regions, forming new “civilizational worlds.” The article concludes that the dichotomy between the corporate state and the civilizational state represents a fundamental choice: between the unification of the world under a single template and the establishment of a genuinely multipolar world order founded on respect for humanity’s civilizational diversity.