Targeting: How the USA and EU Use Individual Sanctions

• In Event: Effectiveness of Economic Sanctions

Abstract

As the response to the military aggression in Ukraine by Russian forces dramatically shows, sanctions have become a go-to foreign policy instrument with which Western powers confront challenges to international peace and security. Shaping the trend of individualizing accountability, the US and the EU as the main bilateral global sanction senders increasingly blacklist individuals and entities to hold them accountable for the instigation of armed conflict – as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine –, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist attacks, or the violation of human rights. The paper seeks to theorize and compare the listing decisions of the USA and the EU. It asks: Which individuals and entities are selected as sanction targets and put on blacklists? And why are specific individuals and entities selected as sanction targets? Developing an original theoretical model, the paper theorizes that listings are driven by (1) trigger events, (2) issue areas, (3) sender traits, and (4) target characteristics. The empirical analysis will apply the theoretical model and analyze the listing decisions for the post-2014 sanctions imposed on Russia. It will thereby lay the basis for an extensive cross-national analysis examining US and EU individual and entity listing dynamics using a novel dataset of US and EU listing decisions.

Author

• Christian von Soest, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)