Sanctions, Signals, and Militarized Conflict

Abstract

Economic sanctions are frequently used as a tool of foreign policy, described by some as falling between diplomacy and military force. An important question regarding the use of sanctions is whether they can function as an alternative to military force by demonstrating the sender's resolve and making military force unnecessary, or if their use tends to result in an increased probability that military force will be used. Based on a theory of sanctions as costly signals, the authors develop and test hypotheses regarding the relationship between sanctions and military force. The results show that after a sanction occurs, there is a significantly increased probability of a use of military force. Democracies, because of their propensity to tie their hands with audience costs, while at the same time facing domestic pressure to devise sanctions to be costless to the sender, are highly likely to be involved in a militarized dispute after using sanctions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 126 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.