Policymakers 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.

Economic sanctions are an integral part of states’ foreign policy repertoire. Increasingly, major powers and international organizations rely on sanctions to address an incredibly diverse array of issues—from fighting corruption to the prevention of nuclear weapons. How policy makers employ economic sanctions evolved over time, especially over the past two decades. The recognition of the adverse humanitarian impact of economic sanctions in the late 1990s and the “War on Terrorism” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have led to major changes in the design and enforcement patterns of economic sanctions. Academics’ understanding of how these coercive tools work, when they are utilized, what consequences they create, and when they succeed are still heavily shaped by research findings based on observations from the latter half of the 20th century. Insights based on past sanctions episodes may not fully apply to how sanctions policies are being currently used. In the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of sanctions cases were initiated by the United States, targeted governments, and involved restrictions on international trade. In the last two decades, however, additional actors, such as the European Union, the United Nations, and China, have emerged as major senders. Modern sanctions now most commonly involve targeted and financial sanctions and are imposed against individuals, organizations, and firms. The changing nature of the senders, targets, stakeholders, and economic tools associated with sanctions policies have important implications for their enforcement, effectiveness, and consequences. The legal-regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure needed to implement and enforce modern economic sanctions has also become far more robust. This evolution of modern sanctions has provided the scholarly community with plenty of opportunities to explore new questions about economic coercion and revisit old ones. The research agenda on economic sanctions must evolve to remain relevant in understanding why and how modern sanctions are used and what their consequences are.

Effective response to and rapid and reliable detection of infectious disease outbreaks require successful coordination of countries’ border policies early on. As threats from diseases are highly salient to the public, researchers agree that a better understanding of domestic politics is crucial. This article investigates a key piece of this question: public demands for border closures. Our experiments in the United Kingdom and the United States show that a greater pandemic threat mildly increases support for border closures, but the World Health Organization's (WHO) guidance against border closures and reminders about international legal obligations to follow the guidance substantially weaken support for border closures. However, during the COVID‐19 pandemic, many countries flouted WHO's recommendations and restricted their borders. Examining media attention suggests people's lack of knowledge of the WHO guidance as a crucial reason for those border closures. Our study produces insights into the design of effective global health governance.

Can imposers of sanctions end economic coercion without the fear of strengthening their targets’ capabilities? Senders may prefer to end sanctions given its ex post inefficiency, yet doing so might provide the target greater access to resources and contribute to its offensive behavior. Targets’ inability to credibly commit to reversing their policies while enjoying the gains from sanctions relief, coupled with the difficulty of perfectly observing their compliance behavior, creates an obstacle for ending sanctions and resuming profitable economic transactions. Using a game-theoretic model of sanctions removal under uncertainty about targets’ intentions and compliance behavior, I formally demonstrate and empirically find that sanctions are more likely to end if senders can successfully detect targets’ compliance, but only if the target considers the promised sanctions relief attractive. Targets that offset the costs of sanctions will not value the promised sanctions relief and choose not to negotiate over sanctions removal.

Although sanctions generate economic costs, target states may “sanctions-proof” their regime by borrowing capital from abroad. While some targets obtain interest-free capital from black knight states, others may need to borrow with interest from international credit markets. These interest rates may sometimes make borrowing cost-prohibitive, giving targets no choice but to acquiesce to the demands of the sender. However, since senders cannot observe if black knight states are assisting target states, targets have an incentive to misrepresent their source of external capital. In an effort to deter sanctions, targets that must borrow at high interest rates may signal that they have black knight support and are sanctions-proofed. We formally and empirically demonstrate that in this uncertain environment, senders are more likely to impose sanctions on targets with low credit ratings, but only do so if the target places a relatively low value on uninterrupted economic transactions with the sender.