Economic Sanctions in Flux: Enduring Challenges, New Policies, and Defining the Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Abstract Policymakers employ economic sanctions to deal with a wide range of international challenges, making them an indispensable foreign policy tool. While scholarship on sanctions has tended to focus on the factors affecting their success, newer research programs have emerged that explore the reasons for why sanctions are threatened and initiated, the ways they are designed and enforced, and their consequences. This scholarship has yielded a wealth of new insights into how economic sanctions work, but most of those insights are based on sanctions observations from the 20th Century. The ways that policymakers employ sanctions have fundamentally changed over the past two decades, though, raising concerns about whether historically derived insights are still relevant to contemporary sanctions policies. In this forum, the contributors discuss the scholarly and policy-relevant insights of existing research on sanctions and then explore what gaps remain in our knowledge and new trends in sanctions policymaking. This forum will inform readers on the state of the art in sanctions research and propose avenues for future research.