Suchergebnisse

Ostensibly bilateral US foreign policy actions, such as sanctions, can influence third-party compliance with US policy preferences. US sanctions simultaneously signal US preferences and demonstrate leverage, which can motivate third parties to avoid or change proscribed behavior proactively. Empirical testing of this strategic behavior typically is difficult given that it predicts non-events in a noisy signaling environment. However, I argue that the global trade of dual-use commodities—those with both civilian and military purposes—is a phenomenon where we can observe this process systematically. I isolate US sanctions that provide relevant context both by stigmatizing the target and signaling that third-party dual-use exports to the target would directly undermine US policy goals. Using newly-coded bilateral data spanning the post-Cold War period, I find evidence that relevant US sanctions are associated with lower third-party dual-use exports to US-sanctioned states. My findings have implications for scholars and policy-makers, suggesting a broad yet shrouded ability of sanctions to advance US foreign policy goals.

I contend that a state's position in the global trade network affects the initiation and outcome of sanction threats. A state is vulnerable, and thus more likely to acquiesce, when its trade has low value to trade partners that are well connected to the global trade network. Conversely, a state has leverage that could motivate the use of sanction threats when its trade has high value to trade partners that are otherwise not well connected. Capturing leverage/vulnerability with an interaction between two network centrality measures, results indicate that vulnerability is associated with acquiescence to sanctions, while leverage is associated with threat initiation.

In this article, I synthesize a number of recent studies exploring how exports affect human rights, highlighting a common implication that this relationship is conditional on how exports are associated with leaders' relative costs of repression and accommodation. Beginning with this synthesis, I develop a theory demonstrating how the composition of exports affects human rights via its impact on leader expectations. More diverse exports promote continued growth and prosperity, provide leaders with greater resources, and suggest conditions less conducive to severe dissent, all of which reduce the relative costs of accommodation. Repression is likely to threaten the benefits otherwise associated with greater export diversity; thus its relative cost increases amid greater export diversity. I test this theory using commodity-level data from the United Nations Comtrade database to create a country-year-level measure of export diversity. Statistical analyses spanning 1981 to 2009 support my expectation. My results are robust to sample restrictions and the use of instrumental variables.

For decades, the US has used sanctions against countries and regimes where they seek to encourage change. But what determines whether or not the US imposes sanctions in the first place? In new research that examines more than 50 years of sanctions, Timothy M. Peterson finds that sanctions are more likely to be imposed against countries with poor allies that will not be able to step in with economic assistance. As the target country's allies become wealthier, it is less likely that sanctions will be put in place.

In this article, I synthesize a number of recent studies exploring how exports affect human rights, highlighting a common implication that this relationship is conditional on how exports are associated with leaders' relative costs of repression and accommodation. Beginning with this synthesis, I develop a theory demonstrating how the composition of exports affects human rights via its impact on leader expectations. More diverse exports promote continued growth and prosperity, provide leaders with greater resources, and suggest conditions less conducive to severe dissent, all of which reduce the relative costs of accommodation. Repression is likely to threaten the benefits otherwise associated with greater export diversity; thus its relative cost increases amid greater export diversity. I test this theory using commodity-level data from the United Nations Comtrade database to create a country-year-level measure of export diversity. Statistical analyses spanning 1981 to 2009 support my expectation. My results are robust to sample restrictions and the use of instrumental variables.