Sanctions effectiveness, development and regime type. Are aid suspensions and economic sanctions alike?

Abstract

The efficacy of international sanctions in bringing about compliance with the goals of the sender is of interest to both International Relations (IR) and development scholars. Yet, aid suspensions receive less attention in sanctions research than economic sanctions, which may be biasing our understanding of sanctions efficacy. Since recent research has established that different autocratic types display diverging degrees of resilience to sanctions, we ascertain whether such claims are applicable to aid suspensions. We put forward several hypotheses. First, we look at how resilient different regime type are to sanctions, and then investigate whether results for aid suspensions differ from those for sanctions in general. After that, we hypothesise that wealth protects autocracies less from aid suspensions than from other sanctions because their effects are markedly harder to evade. With the help of econometric analysis, we test our hypotheses on original data that feature aid suspensions as a stand-alone category. Test results unequivocally corroborate the superior resistance of single-party regimes and monarchies. Importantly, with the only exception of the monarchic category, our results confirm the comparability of aid suspensions with other sanctions with regard to their effects on different regime types, corroborating that their marginal role in sanctions scholarship is unwarranted. A final test on the role of target prosperity uncovers an intriguing nuance: affluence strengthens target resistance to foreign policy sanctions but not to aid suspensions. This confirms our evasion hypothesis: while alternative trade routes can offset a ban on trade with a set of senders, substitute donors are rare. We conclude with some implications for further study.