Agathe Demarais on sanctions as a foreign policy tool

Over the last decades, sanctions have become the West’s diplomatic tool par excellence. Faced with wars, humanitarian crises, and human rights violations, the West’s response has often been to impose sanctions to avoid resorting to military force. This week, Mark Leonard invited Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director of the Economist Intelligence Unit and author of “Backfire – How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests”, to talk about how sanctions work and how they can be truly effective. Have the sanctions on Russia been successful? Is there a danger of the West becoming over-reliant on them? And will they eventually be replaced by other economic weapons?

This podcast was recorded on 24 January 2023.

Further reading

• ECFR’s work on geo-economics: https://ecfr.eu/category/europeanpower/economic-sovereignty/
• Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests by Agathe Demarais
• The global race for semiconductor hegemony with Janka Oertel, Chris Miller and Andrew Small

Bookshelf

• What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
• Kochland by Christopher LeonardSay Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe