States from the Global South have long advanced normative claims against the legitimacy of unilateral sanctions. These arguments have been routinely voiced through UN General Assembly Resolutions, shaping a conventional discourse of contestation of unilateral sanctions. We interrogate whether this discourse was challenged by the deployment of unilateral sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, leading to adjustments. We carry out a content analysis before and after the invasion to identify adjustment patterns. Our analysis shows that Russia’s invasion deactivated claims about the superiority of UN Charter principles and the power asymmetry between senders and targets. Furthermore, it uncovers that the few states in the Global South that engaged in the contestation of sanctions against Russia focused exclusively on the fallout on third countries. The analysis sheds light on the normative limits of contestation.
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