Economic Coercion and Sanctions

Since at least the Athenian trade ban on Megara, in the run-up to the Peloponnesian War, states have used economic sanctions to pursue their foreign policy goals. Using a definition popularized by Hufbauer, et al. (Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 2017, p. 3), political scientists consider economic sanctions to be the “deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal, or threat of withdrawal, of customary trade or financial relations.” Sanctions are imposed by a sender country on a target country. While praised by Woodrow Wilson as a way to force the target government to change its policies while sparing its civilians from the scourges of war, by the end of the 1990s critics charged that sanctions were impotent to change the target government’s behavior but were deadly for civilians. Sanctions have been credited with ending apartheid and preventing nuclear proliferation, and have been criticized for facilitating genocide in the former Yugoslavia and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq (although the latter claim has since been proven to be false). In order to go beyond considering only a handful of examples and consider sanctions comprehensively, political scientists have developed mathematical models to examine how sanctions work in theory, and comprehensive data sets of sanctions cases to study them statistically. They have examined why senders impose sanctions, how targets respond, and what sanctions do to the civilians who live under them.