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The current economic and ecological climate calls for a reappraisal of the international legal and political framework governing natural resources, defined broadly to include materials and organisms naturally occurring in the environment, such as water, mineral and fossil fuels, and cultivated resources, such as food crops, both renewable and exhaustible. This reappraisal is urgent because the governance and management of natural resources have formed a pivotal backdrop to the evolution of international economic law in the post-war period and have been critical components of the process of economic globalization. Contributors to this collection explore the different dimensions of natural resource governance in the contemporary economic, political and legal landscape. They reflect upon and address the different aspects of the conflicts and contradictions arising at the intersection between international economic law, sustainable development and other areas of international law, notably human rights law and environmental law.

This chapter introduces the Research Handbook on UN Sanctions and International Law. The Research Handbook studies UN sanctions in a holistic manner so as to identify cross-cutting issues and common challenges, be they substantive, procedural, practical or political, and to gauge general trends. One trend that can currently be witnessed across regimes may be a partial return to more comprehensive sanctions. Another trend, to some extent related, is the rise of unilateral sanctions, particularly also EU regional sanctions, raising questions of interaction between parallel sanctions regimes. This Research Handbook examines interplays and synergies between UN sanctions and unilateral measures and it explores the different legal frameworks that shape and govern these respective regimes. The Research Handbook frames the analyses of UN sanctions through the notions of ‘individualization’ and ‘formalization’. These notions are introduced in this chapter. In the context of individualization, the legal basis for the Security Council to impose sanctions on actors other than States is discussed as well as the sliding scale from comprehensive to targeted sanctions, evoking the question whether there are also different shades of individualization. The chapter proposes a loose notion of ‘formalization’ as capturing sites where substantive or institutional norms or other rule of law considerations have infused the political setting in which UN sanctions operate. The notion is thus used to offer a shared vocabulary allowing for cross-cutting observations. After introducing those notions, the chapter maps the contents of the Handbook and offers a tentative outlook on the future role and position of UN sanctions. Keywords UN sanctions, individualization, formalization, interplay with EU sanctions