Verónica Fraile del Álamo1, Victor Ferguson2
1Australian National University, Australia, 2University of Tokyo, Japan
Biography:
Verónica Fraile del Álamo is a PhD Candidate in the Australian National University's School of Politics and International Relations. She holds a Double Masters degree in Asian and International Affairs from King's College London and Renmin University, and Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) and Bachelor of International Relations degrees from the Australian National University.
Abstract:
Do authoritarian states sanction differently to democratic ones and if so how? The rise of China and Russia as prominent sanctioning states over the past decade has recently captured the attention of scholars of economic sanctions. Existing hypotheses about the use of sanctions overwhelmingly derive from research on democratic states. While there is a nascent push to probe the utility of those hypotheses in explaining non-democratic sanctioning (Whang and Paik 2023), it faces significant data challenges arising from the fact that China and Russia rely more heavily on (unannounced and typically denied) informal sanctions than formal ones. Recent breakthroughs in data collection on single sender states offer limited leverage for comparison. Synthesizing new data on China and Russia’s respective sanctioning (Zhang and Shanks 2024; Ferguson 2024), we present a new dataset with more than 80 new cases not found in any of the major sanction databases, coded to facilitate comparisons between China, Russia, and other major sanctioners like the United States and European Union. We leverage that data to examine systematic differences in sanctioning behaviour between democratic and non-democratic states, focusing on variations in sanctions instruments, objectives, and implementation strategies. In doing so, we offer new insights into the dynamics and outcomes of sanctions by non-democratic states, extending emerging research streams on how political institutions shape sanctions use, how (in)formality conditions sanctioning outcomes, and the conditions under which sanctions are terminated.