This research project undertakes to identify the conditions under which countries threaten, impose, and lift international economic sanctions, as well as the conditions under which sanctions are likely to succeed in accomplishing their political goals. Understanding the sanctions process is important because economic sanctions are widespread foreign policy instruments that are applied at ever-increasing rates - an informative and comprehensive theory of economic sanctions will not only constitute an academic contribution, but will also provide some guidance regarding the practical use of economic leverage to extract political concessions. This project offers such a theory, the key innovation being that while previous research has mostly looked into the threat, imposition, termination, and success of sanctions one at a time, here all these sanction aspects are integrated into a single theoretical framework. Studying these aspects jointly makes it possible, in turn, not only to explain how these aspects of the sanctions process are interrelated, but also to explain better each individual aspect itself.
The theory advanced here is based on two central premises. First, countries are assumed to resort to economic coercion to improve their bargaining position over disputed policy issues. Second, the occurrence of actual economic sanctions, rather than simply threats, is explained by the disputing countries' uncertainty about their resolve, as enduring the sanctions costs helps to communicate that resolve in a credible manner. The project analyzes two formal models of economic coercion, which generate a number of novel insights based on the latter premises. The intention is to evaluate the models' implications using the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) dataset, complemented by additional data, in order to assess whether, in addition to being theoretically compelling, the explanations generated by the models are also empirically valid.
The main question in the sanctions literature has by far been whether countries can use sanctions to coerce other countries into changing their policies. This project, on the other hand, also asks more complicated questions such as how countries' opportunities to resort to military coercion affect the impact of economic coercion, what the failure of a sanctions threat implies for the success and duration of subsequent sanctions, and how the nature of the agreement associated with the lifting of economic sanctions depends on the timing of that lifting. The answers to these questions are all interdependent and drawn from a single theoretical framework. In turn, this single framework is used to derive specific explanations that account for the differences in the duration of sanctions, the variation in the sanctions outcome over time, the escalation to the use of military force, and the variation in the outcomes of threats and sanctions.
In conclusion, the outlined research project will not only contribute theoretically to the sanctions literature and enrich the field with new data, but will also provide a number of counter-intuitive policy recommendations. Among these, the project suggests, contrary to conventional wisdom, that increasing sanctions costs makes no difference after a certain threshold, that sanctioning countries can avoid extra costs by applying narrowly targeted, "smart" sanctions, which are associated with a smaller cost uncertainty, and, again contrary to conventional wisdom, that if sanctions do work, this is more likely to happen sooner rather than later after their imposition.
