Authoritarian regimes that violate human rights, engage in censorship, or commit other forms of coercive interference with international norms are targeted by sanctions and embargoes. These measures put economic pressure on governments and signal solidarity with oppressed populations, allowing nations to demonstrate their commitment to universal values while encouraging reform by increasing the cost of authoritarian governance. Sanctions and embargoes are powerful tools, used to abolish apartheid and end genocide, and they have helped promote democracy in South Africa, tackle gender inequality in Myanmar, and fight back against terrorist threats around the world.
But the effectiveness of sanctions varies widely and depends on countless variables. For example, some economic sanctions are largely successful at undermining regimes but fail to change their behavior—as in the case of Russia’s gas sanctions, which exacted a heavy financial toll but did not convince Vladimir Putin to give up Osama bin Laden. In other cases, a regime may successfully resist the pressure of sanctions by rerouting trade with foreign partners or transferring assets to loyal supporters.
In addition to their impact on the economy of sanctioned countries, sanctions also ripple through global trade and supply chains. For this reason, it is important to understand the dynamic nature of these policies and the complexity of their ramifications. To this end, we use the Global Sanctions DataBase (GSDB) to analyze the effect of a wide variety of sanctions and their duration. Unlike existing sanctions datasets, which have limited granularity and are essentially static, the GSDB allows for robust dynamic analysis, including a rich specification of the heterogeneous effects of different instruments on both senders and targets.