Sanctioning Violence

Abstract

While economic sanctions are commonly regarded as nonviolent coercive diplomacy, scholars show that senders—particularly democratic senders—are actually more likely to use military force against the targets of their sanctions. In this article, the authors extend this connection between sanctions and military action by arguing that countries targeted with third-party economic coercion are more likely to be targets of dyadic militarized violence from states not involved in the sanctions. The act of sanctioning, the authors argue, lowers the prohibitions to use violence against the sanctioned state by others. Empirical analysis of dyadic data from 1914 to 2000 shows that, within directed dyads, militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation is more likely when the potential target of conflict is sanctioned by third-party states, particularly when the sanctioning state is a large democracy.