Sanctions Work Research Articles

How sanctions work: Iran and the impact of economic warfare. Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad. Salehi-Isfahani et Ali Vaez, Redwood City, Stanford University. Press, 2024, 212 pages

How sanctions work: Iran and the impact of economic warfare. Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad. Salehi-Isfahani et Ali Vaez, Redwood City, Stanford University. Press, 2024, 212 pages

Election proximity and the effectiveness of economic sanctions

Do elections matter for sanction effectiveness? Scholars have long highlighted the importance of domestic political factors in target (i.e. sanctioned) states in explaining when economic sanctions work. This line of research, however, has primarily focused on political regime characteristics and interest groups that are relatively low time-variant during sanction episodes. Building on this literature, we explore the effect of temporal proximity to elections. While the impact of elections have been examined in the context of military conflicts, their possible effects on sanction effectiveness have not been subject to systematic scrutiny. We argue that target governments are more likely to comply with sender demands as elections loom near in order to avoid the likely political costs of sanctions. The effect of elections, however, is likely to vary across different election characteristics and political regime types. We assess the empirical merits of our claims using data on over 1,000 sanction cases between 1950 and 2020. The results from a battery of empirical tests, including those that account for potential selection bias, support our hypotheses. We find that elections have a positive effect on sanction success, and this effect is more prominent in less democratic states that hold competitive elections. This suggests that even if sanctions have a relatively low success rate against non-democratic polities, elections may provide a window of opportunity for senders to extract concessions from target states.

How to Make Everything About Sanctions? Review of “How Sanctions Work, Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare” by Bajoghli, Nasr, Salehi-Isfahani, and Vaez (2024)

How to Make Everything About Sanctions? Review of “How Sanctions Work, Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare” by Bajoghli, Nasr, Salehi-Isfahani, and Vaez (2024)

Do Economic Sanctions Work? Evidence from the Russia‐Ukraine Conflict

AbstractThis study examines the impact of sanctions on Russian firms and the strategies these firms adopt to counter the effects of targeted sanctions. We utilize institutional theory to explain how firms shape their strategic responses as they balance the institutional pressures from their home environment vis‐à‐vis sanctioning countries. We gather longitudinal data on Russian firms that faced foreign sanctions from the start of the invasion of Crimea in 2014 until 2020. Our empirical analyses indicate that sanctions do not have a persistent negative effect on the economic performance of Russian firms. We discuss the empirical findings with the help of a series of illustrative examples of specific actions that Russian firms undertook in response to the sanctions. We conclude that while targeted sanctions create symbolic meaning in foreign relations and create financial friction for targeted firms, firms use a variety of adaptation strategies that negate the economic impact of these sanctions.

Economic sanctions and labour rights abuses in target countries

AbstractThough much research has focused on major political and humanitarian consequences of economic sanctions, little is known about how economic sanctions affect economic rights and freedoms in target countries. Often, sanctions work is divided into two main theoretical camps: direct economic effects and indirect human rights effects. These two bodies of work have significantly expanded our cumulative knowledge around economic coercion, but scholars in each camp primarily speak past one another while rarely drawing together the interrelated threads of direct and indirect sanctions effects. We challenge this common division by examining the extent to which economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States or the United Nations affect labour rights practices. We posit that sanctions, as a direct shock to target economies, will prompt more labour rights violations at the workplace, such as arbitrary firings and the use of child or forced labour. We maintain that sanctions also undermine labour conditions via adverse indirect effects on human rights, civil society and bureaucratic capacity. Results from a time‐series cross‐national analysis lend strong support for the proposition that sanctions are significantly and directly related to worsened labour rights conditions. We further show that sanctions also indirectly contribute to labour rights violations through negative effects on human rights conditions and reduced bureaucratic capacity in target countries. Overall, our study deepens our understanding of the complicated outcomes of sanctions on individuals in target states and illustrates the need for further exploration into the interwoven effects of this popular policy tool.

Do Economic Sanctions Work? Evidence from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Do Economic Sanctions Work? Evidence from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

When Do Imposed Sanctions Work? The Role of Target Regime Type

A number of studies on sanction effectiveness have highlighted the importance of regime type and how it affects the sensitivity of sanctioned states (target) to the economic costs of sanctions. The scholarly consensus holds that mainly because of their responsiveness to domestic audiences, democratic regimes are most likely to give in to the demands of the sanctioning state (sender). I argue that regime type is important not only in influencing leaders’ sensitivity to economic costs—which create incentives to back down—but also to the audience costs—which create incentives to stand firm. I argue that taking the audience cost into account would lead to different predictions about the effect of democracy. Particularly, I argue that the effect of democracy is inverted- U shaped, where full democracies have no higher likelihood of meeting the demands of the sender than mixed (hybrid) regimes. Using a newly released dataset on economic sanctions between 1950-2020, I find robust support for my argument.

Do Collateral Sanctions Work? Evidence from the Irs’ Passport Certification and Revocation Process

Penalties for tax evasion are typically financial, but many jurisdictions also utilize collateral sanctions that deny access to some government-provided service. To learn about the effectiveness of such penalties, we examine a U.S. policy restricting passport access for taxpayers with substantial tax debt, known as “certification.” We find an immediate and strong positive effect on compliance actions when a passport request is denied. We then take advantage of randomization during the policy rollout to identify the direct compliance effect of certification, and find smaller but non-trivial effects whose heterogeneity is consistent with measures of taxpayers’ value of having a passport.

How many hands to make sanctions work? Comparing EU and US sanctioning efforts

Abstract One of the core disputes in the literature on economic statecraft addresses the conditions under which multilateral sanctions are more successful than unilateral ones. Our game-theoretic model implies that extant assessments do not sufficiently differentiate between the varying abilities of multilateral and unilateral senders in credibly threatening and carrying out sanctions. We introduce a selection argument that focuses on the complex decision-making process of the European Union (EU) to impose sanctions. In comparison to the United States (US), the institutional structure of the EU and conflicting economic interests of multiple principals make the imposition of sanctions much more difficult. In addition, the international organization is less accountable vis-a-vis the voters. Both mechanisms render sanction threats by the EU less credible. Since the United States as a unilateral sender can issue more credible sanction threats, imposed US sanctions are a negative selection of cases and thus less successful than restrictive measures imposed by the EU. We test these propositions with a new dataset on threatened and imposed sanctions by the European Union and the United States for the period between 1989 and 2015. The empirical evidence demonstrates that EU sanctions are indeed more successful than those by the US. In contrast, US sanction threats are more successful than those by the EU. We provide evidence for the difficulties of multilateral senders to impose sanctions by showing that EU sanctions are both less likely and less severe, the more varied the economic links of the multilateral sender with the sanctioned state are.

Put over a barrel? “Smart” sanctions, petroleum and statecraft in Russia

With the rise of “smart” sanctions in international politics, the oil sector of some of the world’s leading oil exporters has emerged as a key target. Russia’s oil sector presents a recent case. Much of the scholarly discourse on sanctions has focused on whether and under what conditions sanctions work as intended. Much less has been the attention on the process through which sanctions are having an impact. This article aims to further deepen our understanding of this less explored area by focusing on a target country’s response. It argues that the statecraft of developing a response to sanctions could have substantial role in determining their impact. The paper provides an in-depth case study of how Russia responded to sanctions on its petroleum industry during the five-year period after 2014. It analyses in detail Russia’s response with respect to three key structural constraints for the oil industry: the tax regime, the industry’s organisational setup, and its chronic technological lag. The response in each area has presented opportunities to neutralise or mitigate the impact of sanctions. The paper highlights the limited extent of the Russian government’s response to this end, and provides possible explanations about its choices.

Economic Sanctions in Flux: Enduring Challenges, New Policies, and Defining the Future Research Agenda

AbstractPolicymakers employ economic sanctions to deal with a wide range of international challenges, making them an indispensable foreign policy tool. While scholarship on sanctions has tended to focus on the factors affecting their success, newer research programs have emerged that explore the reasons for why sanctions are threatened and initiated, the ways they are designed and enforced, and their consequences. This scholarship has yielded a wealth of new insights into how economic sanctions work, but most of those insights are based on sanctions observations from the 20th Century. The ways that policymakers employ sanctions have fundamentally changed over the past two decades, though, raising concerns about whether historically derived insights are still relevant to contemporary sanctions policies. In this forum, the contributors discuss the scholarly and policy-relevant insights of existing research on sanctions and then explore what gaps remain in our knowledge and new trends in sanctions policymaking. This forum will inform readers on the state of the art in sanctions research and propose avenues for future research.

ПОЧЕМУ ВТОРИЧНЫЕ САНКЦИИ ЭФФЕКТИВНЫ?

ПОЧЕМУ ВТОРИЧНЫЕ САНКЦИИ ЭФФЕКТИВНЫ?

A rights-based approach to board quotas and how hard sanctions work for gender equality

This article examines whether progress in women’s access to decision-making positions is best achieved through increased levels of development or targeted actions. Drawing on European data for the period 2006–2018, the article examines the association between how gender equal a country is and legislated measures such as board quotas with women’s representation on boards. The analysis then explores how this can be nuanced by differentiating between hard sanctions, soft sanctions and codes of governance. It shows that board quotas cannot be relied upon as instruments of progress independently of a contextual environment that is more gender equal. Furthermore, board quotas with hard sanctions work best, followed by codes of governance, particularly when associated with higher gender equality. However, board quotas with soft sanctions are associated with results that are only marginally better than not having any measure in place. The article concludes that for further and faster progress to be made, introducing legislated board quotas shows great potential, though only in combination with striving for a gender equal society and using hard sanctions. The results call for organizations not to lose focus on ‘rights’ at the expense of the more palatable ‘business case’ for board quotas when striving for equality on corporate boards.

A Symbiotic Relationship? Examining the Convergence of Views Between Practitioners and Scholars on Sanctions Effectiveness

In recent years, sanctions – or restrictive measures within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy – have become one of the European Union (EU)’s instruments of choice for dealing with external crises. Given EU foreign policymakers so often resort to sanctions, they should be aware of the limits, pitfalls, and benefits associated with this instrument. After all, a well-designed and well-managed sanctions policy requires a profound knowledge of the contextual conditions under which sanctions work – or fail to work. This policy-focused article, therefore, compares dominant views held by EU policy practitioners with the sanctions effectiveness literature. Building on thirty-six expert interviews conducted with members of the EU sanctions community, it examines whether there is a basis for evidence-based policy making inside the EU’s sanctions machinery. The article finds that while such basis exists, there is also room for mutual learning between academic experts and EU policy practitioners.

A Virtual Wall of Shame: The New Way of Imposing Reputational Sanctions on Defiant States

What happens after an international court finds a state violated international law? Many realize today that states often fail to comply with such judgments. International courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have to rely on the help of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to shame states into compliance. In 2011, the body charged with enforcing judgments of the ECHR launched a new website dedicated to publishing reports by NGOs that criticize states for noncompliance with ECHR judgments. This website published hundreds of reports, as well as the responses of some accused states. The paper analyzes all the reports published in the first four years since the website was created. This analysis, together with interviews with many of the NGO lawyers involved, sheds light on the way reputational sanctions work in international law. It reveals that NGOs focus most of their attention on legally important cases and on cases that address severe violations. It also shows that NGOs focus on states that usually comply with their international obligations instead of on states that regularly fail to comply with international law.

From probation work to criminal sanctions work: Key changes in social work with offenders in Finland from the 1960s to today

The article addresses key changes in Finnish probation work’s rationalities, mentalities and technologies from the 1960s to the present, examining them within a wider governance theory framework. The article asks how the following aspects of probation work have changed: (1) the conditions of probation work, (2) its institutional self-understanding, (3) its work methods and (4) its objectives. The thesis is that these changes have been connected to several synchronous and multi-layered developments, such as globalization, a re-orientation of Finnish social policy and the introduction of new methods and tools within probation work.

Social preferences can make imperfect sanctions work: Evidence from a public good experiment

Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I test the hypothesis that imperfect sanctions may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using a linear public good with centralized punishment, I find that participants increase contributions even if severity had been insufficient to deter a profit-maximizing individual. The more an individual is averse against exploiting others, the less it matters whether punishment was deterrent.

Rethinking Iran

In keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the United States currently faces five possibilities. Three are unlikely to succeed: Iran either cannot produce the bomb or decides for its own reasons not to do so; economic sanctions work; or a new regime comes to power and adopts radically different foreign policies. Two other possibilities are more plausible: either the West accepts an Iranian nuclear weapon and deters/contains Iran; or the United States or Israel attacks its nuclear facilities. War would be catastrophic; but containment also has penalties. Washington should thus reassess core Western and Iranian strategic interests; offer security guarantees if Iran credibly abandons any pursuit of nuclear weapons and stops other unacceptable behaviour (for example support for Hizbullah and Hamas); explore possible cooperation with Iran in Iraq and (particularly) Afghanistan; and pursue confidence-building measures, such as agreements on incidents at sea, freedom of navigation, and counter-piracy cooperation. The United States has nothing to lose by trying this approach.

The Domestic Political Costs of Economic Sanctions

While a great deal of attention has been to paid to whether or not economic sanctions work, less energy has been devoted to exploring the causal mechanisms that lead to the success or failure of sanctions policies. Often, it is assumed that the population is one important source of political costs for targeted leaders, but this assumption has not been tested. Are sanctions related to an increase in antigovernment activity? How does the domestic political system of the targeted state affect the likelihood of this antigovernment behavior? The findings presented here suggest that sanctions may increase antigovernment activity, but that increase is mitigated by the domestic political structures of the target state. In autocratic targets, political violence is less likely to occur when sanctions are in place. For sanctions against autocratic states to be costly, it appears that the political costs needed to alter behavior must be generated internationally rather than domestically.

How Do Welfare Sanctions Work?

Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, families are subject to greater work requirements, and the severity of sanction for noncompliance has increased. Using Wisconsin longitudinal administrative data, the authors performed event history analysis to examine the dynamic patterns of sanctioning and the patterns of benefits following a sanction. They found that very high rates of sanctioning (especially partial sanctions) and multiple sanctions were fairly common but sanction spells were quite short. The most common transition from a sanction was back to full benefit receipt. The authors also examined the factors associated with being sanctioned and the severity of sanctions by comparing a traditional model with an event history model. They found that it is important to estimate a model that takes into account the period of risk. Results confirm that those who may be least able to succeed in the labor market are most likely to be sanctioned. KEY WORDS: event history analysis; poverty; TANF; welfare programs; welfare sanctions ********** The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193) ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance for single-parent families with children and replaced the entitlement program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. Work requirements were a key component of the legislation, and sanctions for noncompliance were an important part of the policy design. Under TANF, sanctions have taken on much greater significance, both because fewer families are exempt from work requirements and because the new policy of full family sanctions means that failure to comply with those requirements can result in the loss of the family's entire cash grant (Pavetti & Bloom, 2001; Pavetti, Derr, & Hesketh, 2003), as well as the loss of food stamps and Medicaid (Cherlin et al., 2001; U.S. General Accounting Office [GAO], 2000). The number of people no longer receiving benefits because they have been sanctioned has increased concern about how often sanctions are used, who is at risk of being sanctioned, and the effects of sanctions on welfare recipients. A number of studies have examined the characteristics of sanctioned families, the reasons these families did not meet their participation requirements, and the later consequences to them. Most of these studies did not focus on sanctions but looked more generally at families who had left welfare (leavers; see Colville, Moore, Smith, & Smucker, 1997; Westra & Routley, 2000) or were conducted under the old AFDC system (Colville et al.; Fraker, Nixon, Losby, Prindle, & Else, 1997; Kornfeld et al., 1999; GAO, 1997). There is less known about the use of sanctions under TANF. Most of the early studies of sanctions were exploratory and descriptive, assessing the characteristics and describing the experiences of sanctioned recipients or sanctioned leavers. Furthermore, much sanction research has measured a sanction as a simple dichotomous variable (sanction, nonsanction) at a particular time. Relatively few studies have examined the severity of sanctions or the timing and duration of sanctions. We used Wisconsin longitudinal administrative data in our study. These data include detailed information on the timing and severity of sanctions, enabling us to examine the dynamic patterns of sanctioning, factors associated with being sanctioned, and the relationship between sanctioning and subsequent outcomes. POLICY CONTEXT States have broad authority and flexibility regarding the design and use of sanctions. The triggers for sanctions and amount of reduction in the grant vary from state to state. There are various types of sanctions tied to work requirements, child support enforcement, and, for teenagers receiving welfare, the requirements to attend school and live with parents. …