The global economy has been weaponized. It's not clear when it happened, or whether it's even something new, but watching the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made it impossible to ignore. A full phalanx of sophisticated economic tools was mobilized against Russia that threatened to sever it from the global economy. For its part, Russia demonstrated the continued force of its own economic weapons. The speed with which these tools were amassed was testament to years of experiments and practice. Economic tools that had been developed to isolate "rogue states," fight terrorist networks, and punish human rights abusers had begun to show how the carrot of the global market could quickly become a lever of influence and a forceful stick. But these tools gained new prominence as they were refined and redeployed for use in the intensifying economic and geopolitical rivalry between China, the United States, and Europe. Is international law prepared for this reality? Until recently, tools of economic pressure have been left largely to the margins of the discipline, treated at best as the preferred alternative to more regulated fields of military activities, at worst as exceptional tools that could largely be ignored. While every international law textbook has chapters on the regulation of military activity and economic cooperation, few have standalone sections on sanctions. International economic law regimes meanwhile struggle to adapt to the realities of "geoeconomics" and "weaponized interdependence," in which, structures designed to encourage economic cooperation are repurposed as tools of competition and rivalry. This symposium surveys the current state of economic statecraft. It explores how they are or should be regulated. But most importantly, it seeks to put today's economic statecraft in historical, political, and legal context asking critical questions about the international order they reflect and the international order they might require.
