• What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The regulation of key international security issues like nuclear proliferation has radically changed after 9/11. Since then, the international community has mobilized the private sector to fight the financing of terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Banks have been asked to ensure that sanctions against nuclear proliferators, terrorist sponsors and money launderers are enforced, by preventing payments from flowing from, and to, sanctioned territories and/or entities, and the rest of the world. This is an entirely new situation, which is completely under studied. We know little about how banks understand their new commitments as sanctions enforcers, and how their compliance branches identify suspicious transactions that may fall under sanctions.
• Why is it important for society?
The new role of banks in the regulation of international security issues is a key issue for many societies in the world. Indeed global banks are key actors in charge of financing development projects in countries of the Global South as well as trade within the Global South and between the South and North. As more and more local banks in countries from the Global South are held in suspicion of holding assets and/or having clients under sanctions, especially in the Middle East, but also in Russia and China, global banks are tempted to “de-risk,” meaning that they no longer authorize any activity in and with these countries. This situation can have huge financial and economic implications for these countries, as well as for the advanced economies of the North, which are preventing from finding new market opportunities in the developing world. PROSANCT will assess which obstacles global banks face, and how regulators can best help them face their new responsibilities in an intelligent and non-discriminate way.
• What are the overall objectives?
The main objective is to understand the broad social, regulative and discursive logics at work in the emergence of this new transnational field of sanctions. PROSANCT members seek to understand how international institutions (from the UN Security Council to the Financial Action Task Force and the International Monetary Fund) as well as Finance Ministries and diplomatic missions in countries of the global North, explain to global banks which are their new obligations and how to comply with the latest regulations. To do so, two objectives need to be accomplished: 1) to develop a field analysis of the of the key actors who participated in the emergence of a transnational legal field of sanctions from the 1980s to the mid-2010s; 2) to unearth the visions of the world order embedded in the new counter-proliferation legal technologies.
