Skip to content
LPE Originals

Successful Failures: Economic Sanctions, Humanitarianism, and the Undoing of Post-Colonial Sovereignty

By

Humanitarian concerns have generally failed to bring about concrete legal limits on the use of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. However, as the ongoing saga concerning the Afghan central bank’s assets indicates, they have succeeded in something much more fundamental: they have legitimized the use of sanctions as a tool for undoing and re-assembling the sovereignty of a postcolonial state.

LPE Originals

Sanctions’ New Colonizers

By

In this moment of U.S. financial imperialism, a host of “new” colonizers have emerged, including private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against so-called terrorists, terrorist organizations, and countries designated by the U.S. State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. And just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies to destroy and deplete the colonized’s resources, these new colonizers pillage in their own modern way, leveraging and expanding the U.S. government’s imperialist reach.
LPE Originals

The Opacity of Economic Coercion

By

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. The opaque mechanisms through which economic coercion inflicts harm have made it difficult to identify causation, let alone to prosecute its agents under international law, while the rise of neoliberalism and an individualized human rights politics have led to a turn away from the concerns with economic coercion that animated post-colonial legal activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
LPE Originals

Economic Sanctions: Where LPE Meets Third World Approaches to International Law

By ,

To what extent do the very building blocks of international law enable the weaponization of economic asymmetry? How has the expansion of the U.S. financial system shifted the locus of economic coercion in the global order? And what possibilities exist for legal analysis and advocacy to contest such forms of imperialism? To answer these and other questions about the role of law in economic sanctions, this symposium draws together insights from scholars working at the intersection of LPE and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
LPE Originals

Damage Functions (Or Why I Am Mad at Economists)

By

Since the 1990s, mainstream economists have used past weather data to forecast the future costs of climate change. This mode of econometric prediction ignores the alarming tipping points and pervasive uncertainty that characterize our warming world.
LPE Originals

Renewable Power: Who Will Own the Clean Energy Future?

By

The IRA promises to pump billions of dollars into clean energy infrastructure, primarily though tax equity financing. This approach, despite its merits, all but guarantees that our clean energy future will be dominated by incumbent private actors, namely large financial institutions and private developers, who will capture the benefits of abundant low-cost renewable electricity.
LPE Originals

Offset Frontiers, Fossil Capitalism and the Law

By

The very idea of “offsetting” emissions requires the legal creation – and exploitation – of new sacrifice zones. Predictably, this approach has been a disaster for the environment. Less noticed, however, is the extent to which offsetting has warped the entire aim of environmental law.
LPE Originals

From Work in Prison to Carcerality at Work

By

How might organized labor be engaged in ending mass incarceration? One approach is to emphasize how carceral labor is exploited as a substitute for rights-bearing “free labor.” But the mere threat of substitution does not ensure solidarity. A more promising avenue is to consider how carcerality itself extends into so-called “free” labor markets. Under this “carceral labor continuum,” anti-carceral unionism emerges not from broad concerns over economic substitution but instead from the practical demands of workplace organizing.
LPE Originals

Strategic Lessons from Abolitionist Labor Struggle In Immigration Detention

By , ,

Since last summer, immigrants detained in California’s Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex detention centers have been on strike, demanding fair treatment as workers. Meanwhile, legal advocates have engaged in strategic policy campaigns and wage-and-hour litigation to support the strike from the outside. This partnership offers a valuable model for how solidarity and empowerment can blaze a path toward abolition.
LPE Originals

Untangling the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Mass Incarceration

By

Popular historical narratives often trace the origins of penal labor to the post-Civil War South. Yet as insightful and politically useful as this familiar story may be, it overlooks the vast system of forced penal servitude that took shape in the antebellum North. Untangling the nineteenth-century roots of mass incarceration and forced labor can help clarify the shifting dynamics of expropriation, exploitation, and racialization across the long history of the U.S. carceral state.