The vaste universe of non-economic effects of sanctions: a typology

Western sanctions taken in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought back in the public sphere the old academic discussion around the effectiveness of sanctions. Traditionally this debate has been centred around the ability of sanctions to economically coerce the target into changing its behaviour. Yet recent trends have cast doubts upon the centrality of economic coercion in the decisions of policymakers. On the one side, western politicians are adamant that sanctions against Russian should be continued and reinforced while publicly casting doubts on their ability to change the behaviour of Russia, Putin or its key support groups, at least in the short term. In addition, the rise of horizontal sanctions regimes, with listings spanning across countries and contexts, have blurred even more the conception of what an effective sanctions regime might look like. Most people working in and around sanctions would agree that sanctions have effects beyond their ability to economically coerce the target. Non-economic effects of sanctions are often acknowledged but remain understudied. In the academic literature, this broad category covers concepts such as deterrence, signaling, punishment or symbolic goals, among others. While all those functions have in common to look above and beyond the economic effects of sanctions, they do not form an orderly typology nor a coherent language through which one can test, compare and contrast the different non-economic effects of sanctions. This paper starts from the premise that some of the confusion arises from a lack of attention to the meta-theoretical groundings of those different conceptions of the non-economic effects of sanctions. On the one hand, sanctions affect a variety of international actors and institutions, including the target, the sender, third parties and the very structures of the international order. On the other hand, some non-economic effect of sanctions can be understood either as exchanges of information between fairly rational agent while others ascribe more constitutive powers to sanctions, notably their ability to alter the perceptions and identities of actors and institutions. Crucially, those different conceptions of the non-economic effects of sanctions are based on different ontological understanding of what forms the preferences of international actors and the structures of world politics. Surveying existing literature and illustrative case studies, this paper aims to offer a typology of the varieties of ways sanctions, intendedly or not, influence international relations. It aims to offer greater clarity on the fundamental differences between different non-economic effects of sanctions and the meta-theoretical wagers those conceptions rely upon. By doing so it aims to shed additional light on the potential motives of sanctioners, the ways to measure the ‘effectiveness’ of sanctions as well as the ways the rise of economic sanctions as a tool of international statecraft has transformed the international order.