Violence at a Distance: Correcting International Law’s Short-Sighted Vision of Economic Coercion

Abstract

Violence is the infliction of pain or harm with the intention to injure, damage or destroy. Under its general meaning, it can either be carried out physically or through the use of power. Under international law, the key principle that regulates inter-state violence in all its forms is the principle of non-intervention. Though sanctions follow many rationales, they are predominately adopted in order to impose costs, or as some have put it, to impose pain. In international law, coercion is limited to forcible acts; in other words inter-state violence must be physical. Additionally, sanctions are not considered as a ‘use of force’ under the meaning of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. The consequence is that non-forcible acts that rest upon the use of (economic or political) power, such as sanctions, are largely unregulated. Though sanctions are frequently justified as an alternative to war, it is not because they do not involve the use of military force that their impact on the targeted country is any less destructive. This chapter proposes to revisit the traditional legal understanding of coercion as involving physical violence and argues that sanctions constitute economic and structural violence, ‘violence at a distance’, which would allow international law to fully grasp the impact sanctions can have on the targeted state and fill in regulatory gaps.

Keywords: economic sanctions, violence, economic coercion, structural violence