<p>A number of scholars exploring the morality of economic sanctions as a foreign policy instrument have adopted just war theory as their guiding moral framework. In a paper published in this journal, Elizabeth Ellis challenges this approach. She contends that economic sanctions and military warfare are fundamentally different, and that applying a moral framework designed for ethical reflection on military warfare to the case of economic sanctions is therefore unwarranted. To support this claim, Ellis presents three scenarios in which economic sanctions seem intuitively permissible but would be prohibited by just war theory principles. On this basis, she concludes that just war theory is ill-suited for the moral evaluation of economic sanctions. This paper will argue against Ellis’s conclusion. First, I will critically examine her three scenarios, demonstrating that plausible and mainstream interpretations of just war theory can in fact yield the intuitively correct judgments regarding the (im)permissibility of the sanctions in each case. Second, I will challenge her claim that sanctions and military warfare are inherently distinct, arguing that this is false for many widely deployed types of economic sanctions. I conclude that just war theory remains an essential and highly relevant moral framework for assessing the morality of the most common and consequential sanctions regimes.</p>