Allies Are More Likely to Bust Sanctions, New Analysis Shows

Why Sanctions Sometimes Fail

Bryan R. Early tackles a central puzzle in the sanctions literature: when states impose economic penalties on a target, why do third parties sometimes provide the means to evade those penalties? Sanctions-busting—third-party assistance that undermines sanctions—can blunt their effectiveness, but scholars have paid limited attention to who provides that help and why.

Competing Explanations Tested

Early develops two rival theories drawn from major international relations paradigms. The liberal explanation links sanctions-busting to economic incentives and trade ties: states with strong commercial links to a sanctioned target may help preserve trade despite sanctions. The realist explanation emphasizes strategic and alliance-based calculations: states may help or resist sanctions according to balance-of-power considerations or to support allies.

New Measure and Empirical Strategy

To adjudicate these theories, Early builds a novel quantitative measure of sanctions-busting and assembles a dataset of 77 sanctions cases spanning 1950–1990. The analysis tests hypotheses derived from the liberal and realist accounts, drawing on existing work on sanctions, the political determinants of international trade, and indirect interstate relationships.

Key Findings

• The evidence provides strong support for the liberal theory: economic ties and trade incentives are important predictors of sanctions-busting.
• The realist account receives weaker support.
• A striking, counterintuitive result is that a sender state's close allies are more likely than other states to help the target evade sanctions.

What This Means for Policy and Research

These results suggest that economic networks can outweigh formal diplomatic alignments when states decide whether to assist sanctioned targets. For policymakers, the findings imply that designing effective sanctions requires anticipating third-party commercial incentives—including those among allies. For scholars, the study highlights the usefulness of explicit measurement of sanctions-busting and invites further work on how economic and strategic motives interact in interstate behavior.