Practitioner-oriented positionality

Practitioner-oriented positionality is the methodological stance, adopted in Tennant's definitional spine, that analyses economic and financial warfare from the standpoint of the planner and operator, asking how measures work, how campaigns are sequenced, and whether intended effects are achieved, rather than from the standpoint of the judge asking whether they are lawful or just. It is a declared analytic position, not a claim that the normative questions do not matter; the entry exists because the spine names the stance rather than leaving it implicit.

The stance

The spine's definitions and the Economic Kill Chain are built as operational artefacts: phase models, effect taxonomies, and assessment criteria that a financial-warfare planner could use. Effectiveness is the organising measure, and the stance deliberately brackets normative evaluation rather than denying it, in the tradition of David Baldwin's treatment of economic statecraft as a technique of statecraft to be analysed on its own terms. The bracketing is what allows failure to be diagnosed honestly: a practitioner frame can say a campaign failed at amplification without first settling whether it deserved to succeed. It also disciplines the evidence base, since effectiveness claims must be assessed against observable indicators rather than against the analyst's sympathy for the campaign's purpose.

Limits and contestation

The stance is itself contested. Critical scholars argue that effectiveness-first framing normalises coercion, launders its distributional harms into technical vocabulary, and embeds the coercer's perspective in supposedly neutral analysis; the sharpest version is the imperialist anatomy critique. The encyclopedia's response is structural rather than rhetorical: normative constraints, humanitarian costs, and the critical literature are carried as first-class entries alongside the operational ones, and the spine's own framework is subjected to red-teaming. Positionality is disclosed so the reader can correct for it, which is the point of naming the stance at all; an undisclosed stance would do the same work invisibly.

Disclosure does not cure the bias it identifies. The method must specify whose objectives count, which civilian and distributional effects remain inside the assessment, and which legal or ethical questions have been bracketed rather than answered. Independent evidence, rival framings and explicit failure criteria provide the test. Tennant's authorship establishes the stance's provenance only; it cannot validate the framework's categories, causal claims or operational usefulness.

See also

Economic Kill Chain (EKC) · Economic warfare · Normative constraints on economic warfare · Sanctions effectiveness debate · Imperialist anatomy of sanctions (critique) · Red-teaming one's own framework · Economic statecraft

Sources

• David A. Baldwin, *Economic Statecraft*, Princeton University publication record.
• Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges", *Feminist Studies* 14, no. 3 (1988).
• Pierre Bourdieu, "Participant Objectivation", *Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute* 9, no. 2 (2003).
• Joy Gordon, "A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy", *Ethics & International Affairs* 13 (1999).