Excerpt
June 2025, Paper: "The UK sanctions regime is outdated, overcomplicated, and ill-equipped for a world where conflict is less about boots on the ground and more about bytes, banks, and blacklists. Anchored in a legal framework designed for traditional warfare and conventional threats, the current regime is poorly suited to the multipolar, hybrid-conflict world of 2025. This paper calls for a fundamental rethink. We propose a modern, tiered sanctions framework to meet the UK’s foreign policy goals without sacrificing the rule of law or market credibility. Diplomatic, financial, and comprehensive sanctions must be recalibrated to respond to five emerging categories of state aggression: cyber-attacks, human rights abuses, economic sabotage, environmental harm, and political interference."