Wheelwright Lecture: Economic Coercion and Financial War

The end of the Cold War and the widespread imposition of neoliberal economic policies generated utopian projections that the globalisation of the world economy would bring about peace and goodwill among nations.

The rise of neoliberalism, according to its central protagonists, was supposed to depoliticize the economy, foster frictionless trade across borders, and pacify social and international relations.

This lecture examines those new techniques of warfare that have confounded such utopian aspirations by weaponizing the economic and financial ties that were supposed to generate what the nineteenth-century liberal Richard Cobden called “amicable bonds”. Wars may still be fought with conventional weapons but growing interdependence has created new avenues for economic coercion and conflict. This lecture analyses new geopolitical conflicts that are increasingly fought on the economic battlefield.

Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales with a cross-appointment in the Faculty of Law. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism.

Her work has been published in a range of fora including Contemporary Political Theory; Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly, and Theory and Event. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben, (SUNY 2013) and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). She is an editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Find out more about her research.