How Do Economic Sanctions (Not) Work? This page contains information about my three-year, ESRC-funded research project on international sanctions. The purpose of the project is to find out how sanctions operate in practice. What effect do they actually have on the countries on which they are imposed, in political terms? So far, this question has - surprisingly, perhaps, - received far too little attention. The vast majority of the sanctions literature treats target states as coherent units, asks questions like ‘how much GDP was lost in the sanctions episode?’, and asks whether sanctions ‘worked’ to deliver their stated goals - rather than how economic pressure translated (or did not) into political concessions. Of course, much has been written on the humanitarian costs of sanctions, but assessing how many people are harmed is very different from asking how power relations, politics and the state in the targeted country are affected. Articles and books on this question can almost be counted on the fingers of a single hand. We therefore have virtually no idea of how sanctions are actually meant to work to compel political changes in target states. As authors like Jonathan Kirshner have argued, without this extremely basic piece of knowledge, we can have no idea of whether sanctions are likely to succeed or not - we are literally imposing them on a wish and a prayer. This project therefore aims to develop a theoretical approach to analyse how sanctions operate, and deploy this in a small number of detailed case studies. The approach focuses on how sanctions affect the interests, ideologies and strategies of social forces operating on the target state. It considers how sanctions give rise to new class forces, new alliances between groups, and attempts to transform target states. A working paper containing a preliminary outline of this framework will be published soon. I’ve been asked by some scholars why I’ve suddenly become interested in sanctions after writing on ASEAN for so long. The answer is twofold. First, I became interested in sanctions specifically during my research on Burma, where sanctions seem to have done little to alter political outcomes. Secondly, the broad thematic interest guiding my work is a concern to understand the politics of sovereignty and intervention. My work on ASEAN sought to explain when states did and did not respect the principle of non-intervention. I did this by considering how social conflict in ASEAN states gave rise to particular impulses to intervene or to contain the scope of political conflict to the national level. However, one can also analyse intervention in the opposite direction - to consider what effect it has on social conflict and political outcomes in target states. I could touch on this only briefly in my work on ASEAN, though I explored it more fully in an article on statebuilding in East Timor. The sanctions project is my first major effort to work out in detail how foreign intervention transforms target states. I am very keen to make contact with sanctions scholars, and also with policymakers, advocacy groups, NGOs and others who are interested in this topic. I am hoping that this project can be both critical and policy-relevant. Please feel free to get in touch - I would love to hear from you. ‘How Do Economic Sanctions (Not) Work’ is funded by an ESRC First Grants award of £127,557 (RES-061-25-0500)