The contributions to this Handbook demonstrate that the breadth and depth of research on economic sanctions are expanding faster than ever before-with major implications for theory and policy. This Handbook shows that several of the divides that characterize the research on economic sanctions are being bridged. The Handbook brings together the two disciplines that study sanctions but often talk past each other: Economics and Political Science/International Relations. Moreover, both Political Science and Economics are crossing the bridge between quantitative and qualitative approaches, but from opposite sides. In the early years of sanctions research (i.e., back in the 1950s-1970s), the analysis of sanctions was dominated by qualitative case studies and descriptive statistics. Some analysts in that embryonic stage already tried to glean general lessons from (selected) collections of cases (Wallensteen, 1968, is an example). Initially, only a handful of cases was available but as sanctions were used more often, the sample increased. The breakthrough in the analysis of economic sanctions came with Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, the seminal data collection and analysis developed by Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott at the Peterson Institute. Economic Sanctions Reconsidered enabled analysis to be based on a large sample size and that helped to reduce an important source of selection bias apparent in the earlier narrative accounts of sanction failures and successes. Throughout the 35 years since its first publication in 1985, the Peterson Institute's sanction case collection has inevitably received a lot of criticism on the measurement of success, selection bias, and estimation method. 2 However, the main point should not be overlooked here: Economic Sanctions Reconsidered was a major scientific improvement that helped to address the major weaknesses of the existing literature of the 1980s.The universe of sanctions data expanded further when sanction threats were included in the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) project run by T. Clifton Morgan, Navin Bapat, Yoshiharu Kobayashi, and Valentin Krustev. That data set was constructed not so much to provide a more up-to-date overview but rather to bring new threats and uncertainties into the equation since new theories required different data. In 2020 Gabriel J. Felbermayr, Aleksandra Kirilakha, Constantinos Syropoulos, Erdal Yalcin, and Yoto Yotov at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy published the Global Sanctions Data Base, enabling research on the trade impact of sanctions. The sample of sanctions cases was expanded significantly and presently also covers the period of the Trump administration. Diagram 1.1 shows how these three projects relate and partially overlap. It suggests that results may be sensitive to the specific data set used (and even which vintage of that data set was used). The emergence of specialized large-N sources such as the UN targeted data set developed by