Agathe Demarais

Agathe Demarais is a policy analyst and author of Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia University Press, 2022). As at 31 October 2026, the European Council on Foreign Relations lists her as a senior policy fellow heading its geoeconomics and technology team. Its biography records her earlier work as the Economist Intelligence Unit's global forecasting director and as an economic policy adviser for the French Treasury in Russia and Lebanon (ECFR profile).

Sanctions, adaptation and effectiveness

In evidence to the French Senate on 4 February 2026, Demarais argued that sanctions must be assessed against their objectives. In the Russian case, she distinguished constraining the economic and technological capacity to wage war from expecting sanctions alone to end the war, collapse the economy or change the government. Her assessment was that sanctions were imposing constraints, rather than producing those maximal outcomes (Senate evidence).

Her testimony also set out an adaptation argument. Reserve diversification, alternative financial arrangements and digital currencies could together weaken Western sanctions over time, even if no single instrument did so alone. She explicitly cautioned that the dollar remained central to trade and that it was too early to determine its future as an international reserve currency. This is a conditional argument about weaponisation backlash, not a finding that sanctions have displaced the dollar or that every sanctions campaign necessarily accelerates that outcome.

European responses to coercion

With Tobias Gehrke and José Ignacio Torreblanca, Demarais's June 2026 ECFR policy brief explored European responses to potential US coercion in finance, energy and digital regulation. It organised responses into mitigation, deterrence and escalation, and argued for using financial, energy and data flows, market access and regulatory powers to build durable leverage. Its three scenarios are hypothetical exercises, not records of events or forecasts that the described sequences will occur (policy brief).

These public interventions connect sanctions effectiveness to target adaptation and the sender's longer-term options. They establish Demarais's arguments and recommendations. They do not independently establish the causal effect of sanctions on currency use or validate the success of the proposed European responses.

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", biography accessed 31 October 2026.
• Agathe Demarais, Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (New York: Columbia University Press, November 2022). Bibliographic identification; the analysis above draws on the public texts below.
• French Senate, Commission des affaires étrangères, de la défense et des forces armées, "Audition de Mme Agathe Demarais, Senior Policy Fellow à l'European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) et spécialiste de l'économie mondiale et des sanctions américaines", proceedings of 4 February 2026.
• Agathe Demarais, Tobias Gehrke and José Ignacio Torreblanca, "Mitigate, deter, escalate: Europe's options against US economic coercion", European Council on Foreign Relations, policy brief, 11 June 2026.