Approaching the EU Sanctions Policy: An Experiment with Event Analysis

Abstract

For a long time, the US has been a global leader in terms of use of unilateral sanctions. However, the EU is getting increasingly active as sanctions’ initiator. Currently, the EU runs at least 26 regimes of sanctions to address relations with foreign states or tackle functional problems like human rights, nonproliferation, cyber security or counterterrorism. Russia is one of the targets. The EU sanctions policy raises a number of research questions. How active is the EU policy in comparison with other initiators? What are the peculiarities of the EU institutional process of sanctions implementation? What are the key targets and what is the distribution of EU decisions and actions among those targets? To address these questions the article provides analysis of Sanctions Events Database (SED), designed by Russian International Affairs Council. The research implies empirical analysis of EU sanctions policy everyday events in 2020. It also covers sanctions and enforcement actions of separate EU members as well as alignment with the EU sanctions of the third countries. The article attempts to fill in the gap in the literature between quantitative analysis of multiple sanctions cases on the one hand and in-depth analysis of particular cases on the other. It makes a special focus on EU sanctions related to Russia.