How many hands to make sanctions work? Comparing EU and US sanctioning efforts

Post-Cold War sanctioning by the EU, the UN, and the US: Introducing the EUSANCT Dataset

“…In particular, EUSANCT allows the research community to analyze standard questions about the imposition, side-effects, and effectiveness of economic coercion in the entire post-Cold War era. Moreover, EUSANCT allows systematic research to be conducted on the sanctioning process by the EU (see, for example, Weber and Schneider, 2020), which has established itself as the second leading sender of economic sanctions in international politics. Our initial descriptive statistics show that imposed EU sanctions seem to be more effective than coercive measures by the US, which is still by far the most active sender of sanctions.…”

“…Our data shows that the power of the European Union as a sender of sanctions is often underestimated. Weber and Schneider (2020) provide a study explaining the systematic differences in the imposition and effectiveness of EU and US sanctions. 7 Figure 4 plots the mean HSE score for EU, UN, and US sanctions over time.…”

Foreign economic policy in the European Parliament and economic interdependence with foreign powers

“…As the EU has risen as an actor on the world stage since the early 1990s with the Maastricht treaty (about the legal basis for EU sanctions see Weber and Schneider, 2020: 4), and further with the Lisbon Treaty's creation of European External Action Service (EEAS) in 2011, the powers of the EP have increased considerably in relation to other institutions (Klüver and Spoon, 2015; Kreppel and Webb, 2019; Servent, 2017). The EP is involved in various ways in deciding the foreign policy of the EU: it has power to veto major political agreements with partner countries around the world – a right which it has practised in past years; it approves the EU's budget including foreign aid and financing of the EU's civilian and military operations; it approves Commissioners with a foreign policy portfolio (Cini and Borragán, 2016: 249).…”

“…Recent studies show that economic networks are commonly used to coerce other nations, a phenomenon described as weaponised interdependence (Farrell and Newman, 2019). 1 Within the sanctions literature, scholars have detected a relationship between high levels of economic interdependence with a foreign power and policy makers’ unwillingness to impose sanctions of that same power (Bapat and Kwon, 2015; Weber and Schneider, 2020: 5): sanction decisions are often vetoed (or not enforced) by countries that have strong economic interdependence with the target state. Economic ties with the target state may undermine the senders’ domestic competitiveness, providing a disincentive to impose sanctions.…”

Quantifying the Impact of Economic Sanctions on International Trade in the Energy and Mining Sectors

“…While the literature on sanctions is very large, spanning across political science and economics, 3 the studies that focus on the impact of sanctions on the energy and mining 3 Without any attempt to offer an exhaustive review of the sanctions literature, the following are just few very recent examples of academic papers that study sanctions, Ahn and Ludema (2020), Attia et al (2020), Besedeš et al (2020), Crozet et al (2020), Hufbauer and Jung (2020), Joshi and Mahmud (2020), Miromanova (2020), Morgan and Kobayashi (2020), and Weber and Schneider (2020).…”