Building norms of economic coercion

Across most of the world’s major geopolitical struggles, states have increasingly turned to tools of economic coercion. Despite growing criticisms of overuse and concerns that it generates risks to global stability, law and legal institutions have largely failed to meet the challenge presented by these developments. In particular, they have yet to produce a clear set of guidelines that could help shape the bounds of appropriate use of the modern tools of economic coercion. In this article, we move away from any specific method of coercion or incremental reform proposals that have already surfaced and instead go back to first principles. We propose and defend a broad normative framework for the evaluation of recourse to various methods of economic coercion, drawing on notions of input, output, and throughput legitimacy: who makes the rules, for what purpose, and by what means. We argue that multilateral measures that promote public goods are presumptively legitimate, while unilateral measures imposed for parochial reasons face serious legitimacy concerns. Yet even the latter measures could mute criticism if they meet a secondary set of criteria based on throughput legitimacy. Our framework will help policymakers distinguish between different types of actions and offer a roadmap for reining in ‘the economic weapon’, with the hope that law and international institutions would eventually catch up.