Imposing Sanctions: States, Firms, and Economic Coercion1

Abstract

The majority of research on economic sanctions focuses on the effectiveness of sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Although the number of sanctions episodes is rapidly growing, the empirical record suggests that sanctions, while possibly effective for symbolic purposes, often fail to alter the behavior of target states (Wagner 1988; Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot 1990; Pape 1997; Drury 1998, 2001). But even though the empirical work indicates a poor performance record, many scholars have attempted to identify conditions under which sanctions have the greatest chance of success (Tsebelis 1990; Smith 1996; Drezner 1998). For example, Clifton Morgan and Valerie Schwebach (1996) argue that sanctions aimed at the political elites within a target state increase the probability that sanctions will succeed. Further research investigates the relation between sanctions success and target regime characteristics (Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Al-Sowayel 1999), unilateral versus multilateral imposition (Martin 1992; Kaempfer and Lowenberg 1998), conflict expectations (Drezner 1998), and the duration of imposition (Bolks and Al-Sowayel 2000). Recently, scholars have advocated examining the effectiveness of threats to use sanctions in addition to imposing them to eliminate potential selection bias problems in current empirical research (Smith 1996; Drezner 1999; Morgan and Miers 1999).