IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jieclw/v28y2025i3p468-489..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The laws of financial decoupling: financial lawfare in US–China friction

Author

Listed:
  • Tamar Groswald Ozery

Abstract

A de-globalizing, securitized geoeconomic order has altered the role of legality in international economic relations, turning domestic legal institutions into tools of statecraft and transforming economic law into economic lawfare. This article identifies global finance as a pivotal yet underexplored domain of economic lawfare, introducing the concept of financial lawfare—the use of domestic legal instruments to strategically regulate, reroute, or restrict cross-border capital flows in service of geopolitical aims. Based on content analysis and hand-coded data from over 700 legal documents (study period 2009–2024), the article presents an empirically grounded, comparative account of how the USA and China have strategically mobilized financial lawfare. It highlights distinct institutional approaches, strategic logics, and trends, while showing their convergence in treating finance as a domain of geopolitical contestation. The article argues that financial lawfare has turned financial governance from a prime vehicle of economic integration into a force of global fragmentation, raising new questions for the future of international financial law and global market implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Tamar Groswald Ozery, 2025. "The laws of financial decoupling: financial lawfare in US–China friction," Journal of International Economic Law, Oxford University Press, vol. 28(3), pages 468-489.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jieclw:v:28:y:2025:i:3:p:468-489.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jiel/jgaf031
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jieclw:v:28:y:2025:i:3:p:468-489.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jiel .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.