title: Sanctions and the Blurred Boundaries of International Economic Law
abstract: Economic sanctions are often said to occupy a middle space between communiqués and combat. As this description makes clear, sanctions are a political tool – but a political tool that operates through economic regulation. They are simultaneously economic and political. Their dual nature seems to place sanctions in a twilight zone, neither truly in nor out of the academic discipline of international economic law (“IEL”). Sanctions tend to be marginalized in IEL scholarship, generally taking little