Looking to Save Face? Political Cover and Failed Sanctions

• In Event: Effectiveness of Economic Sanctions

Abstract

From the failed US-led grain embargo on the USSR following its invasion of Afghanistan to the 2018 Saudi-led embargo on Qatar, sanctioning states must decide when to lift sanctions that have failed to induce concessions from the target. However, capitulation should damage the sender state’s reputation for resolve and reputation for reliability, thereby making current and future sanction targets less likely to concede, and making partners harder to find, respectively. Under what conditions do sender states lift failed sanctions? I argue that sender states look for political cover from allies in order to lift failed sanctions. In particular, sender states are more likely to capitulate when they are pressured by allies to lift sanctions against a target. Senders, looking for political cover from domestic audience costs and international reputational costs, can justify their capitulation by emphasizing its benefits for alliance cohesion. I create an original dataset of all sanction cases from 1950-2022 that codes and disaggregates intra-alliance pressure. Testing my hypotheses leads to two central findings: senders are more likely to capitulate when their allies publicly call on them to lift sanctions and when junior partners publicly exit a multilateral sanction coalition. My theory and results provide a novel perspective to the old question of sanction effectiveness from a sender-centric perspective.

Author

• Paul Silva, University of Pennsylvania