During his second term, US President Donald Trump has used or threatened tariffs against numerous countries in ways that blur the borders between economic and political demands and between tariffs and unilateral economic sanctions. Trump framed his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs as tools to pressure other states to abandon policies that do ‘tremendous economic harm’ to the USA, the US has also imposed or threatened tariffs for reasons entirely unrelated to trade. Despite the language of “liberation” and the rhetorical association of tariffs with freedom, the US President has made clear that the intent behind his tariffs is primarily coercive. That is, they are measures to pressure states to subordinate their sovereign rights and submit to the will of the United States. In this respect, the Trump administration is using tariffs in ways that starkly resemble the ways in which unilateral economic sanctions (or “unilateral coercive measures”) have been used for decades. Meanwhile, after decades in which sanctions became increasingly targeted and ‘humane’, we are also seeing the revival of comprehensive sanctions packages that explicitly aim to destroy the economies of targeted countries and cause widespread immiseration.

After decades in which neoliberal ideas of ‘economic freedom’ justified removing trade barriers, the US is one of many states that are weaponizing trade, finance and investment for geopolitical ends. From China’s use of economic coercion against Lithuania after the latter set up a trade office in the name of ‘Taiwan’, to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States’ blockade of Qatar to pressure it to take steps that included shutting down Al Jazeera, economic networks have become powerful vectors of coercion. While commerce is becoming increasingly warlike, wars are increasingly fought using economic tools, from the US’s operation Economic Fury against Iran to Israel’s starvation of civilians as a method of its genocidal warfare in Gaza. Today, distinctions between tariffs and sanctions, and trade and warfare are collapsing in favour of ‘full-spectrum economic coercion’ which weaponizes the infrastructures and networks that sustain human life and threatens to impoverish people across the globe.

This workshop treats economic coercion as a lens through which to view the rise and fall of neoliberalism, with its ideologies of economic freedom, pacifying commerce, and globalisation. It begins from the premise that, rather than being a stable concept that can be defined ahistorically, any definition of economic coercion draws on a philosophical theory of freedom and on assumptions about the legitimate borders between state and market, politics and economics, coercion, and competition. In a world saturated by the coercive use of economic power, conflicts about here to draw the line between economic coercion and economic freedom reflect clashing political, economic, and philosophical assumptions, as well as conflicts of interest.

Participants are invited to examine the ideas of freedom and coercion that informed the post-Cold War neoliberal settlement, and those that are coming to prominence in the context of its unravelling. As the blurring of commerce and war challenges disciplinary boundaries and forms of expertise, the workshop will bring together philosophers, political economists, historians, politics and international relations scholars and international lawyers to trace the contours of today’s full-spectrum economic coercion. We invite reflections on the following (non-exclusive) topics:

• Neoliberal theorisations of economic freedom and economic coercion.
• The shifting relation between commerce and warfare.
• Trump’s tariffs in the history of economic policy.
• Theories of economic power.
• Contemporary economic warfare and its antecedents.
• The history and use of starvation as a method of warfare.
• The role of coercion in neoliberal governance.
• Sanctions and/as warfare.
• Theories of total war and limited war and their economic corollaries.
• Economic coercion and the transformation of international order.
• Global South challenges to economic coercion.
• The history of attempts to regulate economic coercion in international law.
• Infrastructures of economic coercion.
• Legal challenges to unilateral coercive measures.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short bio to the following email address by August 30th fullspectrumeconomiccoercion@gmail.com

Limited funding may be available for speakers who do not have access to institutional funding. Limited spaces will also be available for PhD students to participate without presenting.

The workshop is sponsored by the Australian Research Council Future Fellow-ship project Economic Sanctions After the Cold War (FT230100697) and the UNSW Scientia scheme.

December 9-10 2026. University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Organised by Jessica Whyte, Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of New South Wales

For any questions, write to the workshop email address above or email Jessica Whyte on

J.Whyte[at]unsw.edu.au