Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2024
ISSN
0889-7743
Publisher
Yale Law School
Language
en-US
Abstract
This Article demonstrates how hierarchies in the international economy and in international financial institutions have facilitated the U.S.-led Global War on Terror (GWOT). Using U.S.-Pakistan relations as a case study, it shows how the United States has deployed its powerful position at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to claim Pakistan's consent for its military activities in the region. In the GWOT's first decade, beginning in 2001, the United States openly sought forcible regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq; in its second and (now) third decades, the United States has waged covert counterinsurgency campaigns allegedly against militant groups in Muslim-majority states. The United States has depended on partnerships with other states, such as Pakistan, to engage in these military maneuvers. It relies on the doctrine of consent to exonerate its actions, arguing that Pakistani authorities have agreed to its interventions.
I show how the United States has manufactured the conditions for Pakistan's consent. With the IMF, and over the course of several decades, the United States has helped create Pakistan's debt dependency, cultivate a domestic constituency that courts bailouts, and strengthen the military's prominent role in political affairs. The United States has conveniently leveraged these dynamics to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the GWOT.
The rules governing the IMF have helped produce Pakistan's dependence. They allow the IMF to impose lending conditions on states in crisis with no demonstrable benefits and without accountability. Those rules also empower creditor states, like the United States, to use the multilateral institution for their own geopolitical objectives. IMF lending agreements adopt a formalist and statist conception of sovereignty that ignores the distributional consequences of borrowing. As long as a country's representative signs the lending agreement on the dotted line, the debt is owed, and the conditions are binding. Whether the debts incurred by a state benefit a minority or cultivate dependence are not grounds to vitiate loan agreements
This Article suggests that consent, as a safeguard against extraterritorial force, is only as strong as states' ability to avoid economic compulsion. In turn, meaningfully enforcing the prohibition against the use of force, a pillar of our international legal order, may require transforming how international financial institutions, like the IMF, are governed.
Recommended Citation
Zohra Ahmed,
The Price of Consent
,
in
49
Yale Journal of International Law
208
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3712
