What (not) to do about globalised ‘oligarchs’?

This article concerns the Russian ‘oligarchs’ targeted with sanctions in response to the war in Ukraine. It makes three contributions. First, the article presents a dataset on 60 ‘oligarchs’, which illuminates the lives and wealth strategies of super-rich Russians before and after the sanctions. Second, it assesses the motivations behind the targeted sanctions against the ‘oligarchs’, and examines the flawed logics that made their failure, on any metric, a foregone conclusion. Third, having contextualised the sanctioned Russian ‘oligarchs’ within a much broader trend of super-rich individuals moving themselves or their assets out of their autocratic country of origin, the article outlines what a more coherent liberal democratic policy towards such globalised ‘oligarchs’ should look like. It proposes three policy principles that would together amount to a ‘liberal bargain’ on offer to super-rich individuals from authoritarian states of origin.