Agathe Demarais

Agathe Demarais is a French economist and policy analyst whose Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (2022) presents an unintended-consequences and adaptation critique of sanctions. As at 29 July 2026, the European Council on Foreign Relations lists her as a senior policy fellow for geoeconomics and records earlier work in economic forecasting and for the French Treasury (ECFR profile).

The argument

Backfire accepts that sanctions can work but argues their effective envelope is narrow: they succeed when goals are modest, action is fast, and the target is commercially entangled with the sender, and they decay with time as targets adapt. Its centre of gravity is what happens outside that envelope. Sanctions and the threat of secondary sanctions push targets and bystanders alike to insure themselves: Russia's fortress economics after 2014, China's development of payment and technology alternatives, Iran's evasion architecture, and the gradual construction of financial channels beyond US reach. Each campaign, Demarais argues, accelerates de-dollarisation at the margin and hands adversaries a shared interest in building the workarounds, so the instrument's future effectiveness is spent to purchase present pressure. She also documents the humanitarian and commercial costs that fall on third parties, from over-compliance by banks to shortages in target populations, drawing on the country-level forecasting casework, Russia, Iran, China and the semiconductor controls among them, that she ran at the EIU.

Significance

Read with Drezner's overuse critique and McDowell's work on currency diversification, Backfire is a useful account of Weaponisation backlash. How far de-dollarisation has proceeded, and how much sanctions caused it, remain contested. Demarais's contribution is a mechanism-based argument, not a settled causal estimate.

See also

Weaponisation backlash · De-dollarisation as backlash dynamic · Sanctions overreach · Sanctions fatigue (diminishing marginal returns) · Secondary sanctions · Sanctions effectiveness debate · Daniel McDowell

Sources

• European Council on Foreign Relations, "Agathe Demarais", profile current to 29 July 2026.
• Agathe Demarais, Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
• International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves, dataset used to test broad claims about reserve-currency diversification.