The laws of financial decoupling: financial lawfare in US–China friction

A de-globalizing, securitized geoeconomic order has altered the role of legality in international economic relations, turning domestic legal institutions into tools of statecraft and transforming economic law into economic lawfare. This article identifies global finance as a pivotal yet underexplored domain of economic lawfare, introducing the concept of financial lawfare—the use of domestic legal instruments to strategically regulate, reroute, or restrict cross-border capital flows in service of geopolitical aims. Based on content analysis and hand-coded data from over 700 legal documents (study period 2009–2024), the article presents an empirically grounded, comparative account of how the USA and China have strategically mobilized financial lawfare. It highlights distinct institutional approaches, strategic logics, and trends, while showing their convergence in treating finance as a domain of geopolitical contestation. The article argues that financial lawfare has turned financial governance from a prime vehicle of economic integration into a force of global fragmentation, raising new questions for the future of international financial law and global market implications.