Sanctions and Economic Warfare
Overview
Contemporary geopolitics increasingly employs economic tools including sanctions, trade restrictions, financial manipulation, and technological control as instruments of strategic power. This economic warfare operates across an interconnected global system, affecting civilians, corporations, and governments alike. This project charts the growing weaponization of the global economy, analyses the boundaries of their lawfulness and legitimacy, and examines the limits of economic coercion within a contested but interdependent international order.
Team
Project directors
Dr Joshua Andresen
Associate Professor of National Security and Foreign Relations Law
Biography
Joshua (JD, Yale; PhD, Northwestern) is an international lawyer working in national security and human rights law. His areas of expertise range from the law of armed conflict and international human rights law to anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, including sanctions compliance and the regulation of cryptocurrencies and exchanges. Joshua’s recent writing has focused on legal questions that arise in modern conflict and counterterrorism operations due to power asymmetries, the geography of the battlespace, and technological developments, with influential pieces appearing in the Yale Journal of International Law, the Harvard National Security Journal, and an anthology by Oxford University Press. Given the practical focus of his work, Joshua has been called upon to advise states, provide expert opinions for international tribunals, and contribute to the work of UN Special Rapporteurs.
Prior to Surrey, Joshua was Senior Policy Advisor for Europe, Russia, and Central Asia in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He was also an Attorney-Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser for African and Near Eastern Affairs and in the Office of the Legal Adviser for United Nations Affairs. Joshua’s work at the State Department was supported by a Robina Human Rights Post-Doctoral Fellowship from Yale Law School. Joshua’s international law and human rights experience includes work at the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the High Court of Bombay. While in law school, Joshua also worked to defend people facing the death penalty with the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Equal Justice Initiative. Prior to his law and policy work, Joshua was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut.
Dr Eric Golson
Associate Professor of Economics
Biography
His current research interests include international trade warfare, business decision making during war, effectiveness of economic sanctions, military spending, and resource management in the context of war. An active member of two research clusters at Surrey: Centre for International Macroeconomic Studies (CIMS) within the School of Economics and the Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition (CGPC) within the Politics faculty, Eric was previously a Research Fellow at Oxford University from 2011-2016.
Eric holds a PhD and PGCHE from the London School of Economics. He earned his BA and MA degrees from the University of Chicago. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society for his work in Economic History.
Research outputs
- Andresen, Joshua (2026) ‘Sanctions, National Security, and Free Speech’
- Golson, Eric (2025) ‘War does not necessarily mean business success’
- Andresen, Joshua (2024) The Lawfulness of Unilateral Sanctions in the Wake of a US-China ‘Sanctions War’
- Andresen, Joshua (2023) ‘US Secondary Sanctions: Lawful After All?’
- Golson, Eric et. al (2022) ‘The impact of Sino–US trade friction on the performance of China's textile and apparel industry’.