[SydPhil] UOW Agora Speaker Series – Jessica Whyte (UNSW) – Thursday 6 November, 3.30pm

[Elena Walsh]

Dear all,



The final seminar in this semester's Agora series will be:



*A/Prof. Jessica Whyte (UNSW) *

*Economic Sanctions: Between Economic Coercion and the ‘Mute Compulsion of
Economic Relations’ *

Thursday, November 6, 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Building 19, Room 2072B (ASSH Seminar Room) in the Research Hub on the 2nd
floor of Building 19, UOW (Keiraville campus)



All most welcome.



~



*Abstract. *

Economic sanctions are generally understood to involve the coercive use of
economic power for political ends. Most theorisations of the coercive power
of sanctions understand economic coercion as ‘the threat of act by a sender
government or governments to disrupt economic exchange with the target
state, unless the target acquiesces to an articulated demand.’ (Drezner).
Such a definition is in line with the neoliberal understanding of coercion,
offered by Friedrich Hayek, according to which “one man’s actions are made
to serve another man’s will, not for his own but for the other’s purpose”.
Yet, while the imposition of sanctions is narrowly coercive, in the sense
that particular agents impose sanctions on others in order to achieve
particular concessions, the mechanisms through which sanctions operate are
opaque and abstract. Sanctions impoverish people, increase unemployment,
degrade health systems, cause inflation, devalue currencies, and all
without intending to have a particular effect on any particular person.
This has made it all too easy to obscure the devastating effects of
economic coercion. Those whose biological life and life chances are
degraded by economic sanctions are not mere collateral damage; the coercive
strategy of economic sanctions operates via the life of the population.
But their wills are not the direct targets of economic power, and their
suffering is largely indistinguishable from the suffering of the poor under
capitalism everywhere. In this paper, I draw on the thought of Karl Marx on
the mute compulsion of economic relations and Simone Weil on abstract
domination, in order to better understand the operations of economic
sanctions.



*Bio. *

Jessica Whyte <https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/vXY1CD1vlpTJMD106UWfZujPtNr?domain=unsw.edu.au> is an Associate
Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia,
with a cross-appointment in the Faculty of Law. Her work integrates
political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse
contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and
militarism. She has a particular interest in the political stakes of
mobilizing the category of the human, and in the way claims to protect
humanity are bound up with rationalizations for abandoning certain lives
and for state-sanctioned killing. She has published widely on human rights,
humanitarianism, and neoliberalism, and contemporary European philosophy in
a range of fora – including Humanity: An International Journal of Human
Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political
Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly; The Journal of Genocide Research; and
Theory and Event. She is the author of two published monographs: Catastrophe
and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben
<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/A7iwCE8wmrt0nkmMAiwhVu72oRU?domain=sunypress.edu> (SUNY, 2012),
and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/sKAQCGv0oyCOq2mGytpiZuBSO5j?domain=versobooks.com>
(Verso, 2019). She is currently working on an Australian Research Council
Future Fellowship project on Economic Sanctions after the Cold War.

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