You are co-managing the Sanction and Sustainable Peace Hub, which was created last autumn. In which context was it created and what are its objectives and priority projects?

The Geneva Graduate Institute has long been a champion of sanctions research. Our colleague in political science, Thomas Biersteker – widely considered as one of the founding fathers of sanctions scholarship – has run a wide range of sanctions-related projects, as well as creating the Targeted Sanctions Consortium, from which its evaluations of UN targeted sanctions have been issued in academic publications and practitioner-oriented apps. He was also part of the multistakeholder group that worked towards the creation of targeted sanctions just over 20 years ago, which were instigated in response to the public outcry associated with humanitarian impacts of the comprehensive sanctions regimes imposed by the United Nations (UN) against Iraq, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia, and by the United States (US) against Cuba. Over the course of the last decade, other research projects on sanctions at the Institute have added to this body of expertise and capacity on this ever-popular tool of foreign and security policy, both in terms of varied academic disciplines and growing sanctions practices outside the UN framework. Indeed, the use of sanctions in diplomatic policymaking worldwide has increased exponentially in recent years, by countries across the Global North, but also the Global South; sanctions have also become far more complex. In light of these factors, we created the Sanction and Sustainable Peace Hub to showcase relevant research and wider activities on sanctions carried out at the Geneva Graduate Institute. We hope the hub can serve as a platform for future research and policy engagement on a diverse set of sanctions-related topics, able to respond flexibly to developments in this fast-changing and increasingly prominent field.

What is the complementarity of your expertise and what can it bring to the hub?

Erica Moret – The complementarity of our research comes from the diversity of our backgrounds. I have been covering the topic for 20 years from both an academic and policy perspective, studying sanctions in relation to Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as in connection with conflict resolution, security guarantees in the Ukraine context, chemical weapons, cyber-attacks, alignment and leadership, the global COVID-19 pandemic and modern slavery/human trafficking. More recently, I have provided evidence on sanctions to the US Congress, both United Kingdom Houses of Parliament, the Canadian Senate and the European Parliament. The bulk of my work now focuses on the unintended humanitarian consequences of sanctions, including in relation to humanitarian assistance, migrant remittances, financial inclusion and over-compliance in the financial and private sectors. This includes applied research, strategic advisory roles and coordination of multistakeholder dialogues on behalf of UN agencies, the European Union, Global Affairs Canada and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA). I also taught master’s courses on sanctions at the Institute and Sciences Po and offer capacity building and training courses on sanctions for humanitarian actors at the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies, the UN Secretariat and Polisync Centre for International Policy Engagement.

Grégoire Mallard – I came to sanctions research from an interest in nuclear nonproliferation and in the global governance of trade and finance, which were the subjects of my first and second monographs. In my project “Bombs, Banks and Sanctions”, which is funded by the European Research Council, I built a team with Aurel Niederberger (now working at the FDFA), Farzan Sabet (researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research) and Jin Sun (now Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong), which focused on US sanctions programmes and their effects on the transformation of the global regulation of finance. Together with Erica Moret and Jin Sun, we combined our expertise to design a Swiss Network for International Studies-funded project entitled “When Money Can’t Buy Food and Medicine” on the unforeseen disruptions of global value chains in the humanitarian sector, out of which the idea of creating the hub emerged. We are also working together, alongside a Swiss film team, to create a documentary on sanctions and financial sector “de-risking”.

Are sanctions an effective tool for peace? From your perspective, were they useful against Iran and are they useful against Russia?

For a long time, sanctions researchers have sought to answer precisely those kinds of questions: What are the best methodologies to evaluate whether sanctions are commensurate with the policy goals and do they achieve the latter? What unintended effects can they produce? Do promises of sanction-lifting persuasively bring sanctioned governments to the negotiating table? As you can imagine, answers to these questions widely vary and it would be impossible to give you a simple answer in two lines. Building on existing scholarship, our recent research is original in changing the kinds of questions asked and focusing on the effects of sanctions on the global and transnational networks of power, which can cause bottlenecks in the flows of financial instruments, traded goods and supply chains.

Learn more about the Sanction and Sustainable Peace Hub. 

This article was published in Globe #31, the Institute Review.