17th Annual Wheelwright Lecture: Dollar Hegemony as Law-Making Power, or How the Dollar Shapes the Rules of Global Capitalism

Speaker: Ntina Tzouvala, Australian National University

Lawyers are latecomers in discussions about dollar hegemony and its effects on international relations and order. The overt weaponisation of the US Dollar in the past 10-15 years has made this reality impossible to ignore, but has largely directed legal debates toward the urgent, but limited, question of sanctions. In addition, discussions about dollar hegemony and the law often focus on the crucial, but unnecessarily narrow, issue of monetary sovereignty. Taking these two issues seriously, this lecture will suggest that they are only part of a broader range of powers and privileges afforded to the United States by dollar hegemony. Deploying a materialist understanding of international law-making, I will suggest that dollar hegemony operates as law-making power in ways antithetical to notions of equal sovereignty that emerged after decolonisation. In so arguing, I also aim to open a dialogue both with heterodox political economists and with law and political economy (LPE) scholars about the precise relationship between international law and the political economy of global capitalism.

Ntina Tzouvala is Associate Professor at the ANU College of Law. Her work focuses on the political economy, history and theory of international law. She is the author of Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law, published by Cambridge University Press. She is Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

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