The Failure of the ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign : A Social Conflict Analysis of how U.S. Sanctions Transformed Coalitional Struggles in Venezuela 2017 – 2022

Sammanfattning: Despite economic sanctions generally failing to achieve their intended goals, the global use of sanctions has increased dramatically since the end of the Cold war. A recent example of a sanctions regime unsuccessful in realizing its ostensible goal is that of the U.S. ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Venezuela between 2017 – 2022, which did not succeed in removing the incrementally authoritarian Maduro regime from power. Moreover, in spite of a plethora of sanctions research, there is still a poor understanding—both amongst academics and policy-makers—of how economic costs translate into political outcomes in target states. One promising framework to address this issue is Social Conflict Analysis as developed by Lee Jones (2015). This study applies this Gramscian framework to analyze how sanctions affected the Venezuelan political regime between 2017–2022. Using process tracing and historical-sociological analysis, the study draws on various textual sources relating to Venezuela and the sanctions conflict in order to examine how the major socio-political forces competing for state power were differentially impacted by the material brunt of U.S. sanctions, and how this in turn conditioned and transformed domestic political struggle. The analysis concludes sanctions had significant domestic political effects, although they did not radically change pre-existing conflict dynamics. Furthermore, the study concludes that sanctions had disproportionately negative political implications for the opposition coalition, whereas the regime quite successfully adapted sanctions-induced material constraints through shifting the state’s strategic selectivity to new and strategic support groups, as their previous ruling strategy was rendered unviable. This can explain why the U.S. sanctions campaign was largely abortive.