Economic sanctions for peace: The non-violent option for whom?

Sammanfattning: There is a consensus in previous research that economic sanctions have a low level of effectiveness in reaching objectives. Despite this, economic sanctions are consistently used to reach different international goals. In later years, economic sanctions have become one of the most common actions in response to foreign conflict and terrorism. As prior research has stated that economic sanctions were initially developed to be as harmful as possible, this study aims to assess the effectiveness and appropriateness of economic sanctions as a tool to achieve conflict resolution and peace building objectives. This is done by using panel data regressions analyses with fixed effects to deduce the effect of two definitions of economic sanctions on three definitions of conflict intensity in two different time periods, 1989-1999 and 2000-2019. The results show that no definition of economic sanctions has had a decreasing effect on any definition of conflict intensity. Rather, in 1989-1999 economic sanctions either had no effect or they had an increasing effect on conflict intensity. In 2000-2019 economic sanctions only had increasing effects conflict intensity. The results suggest that economic sanctions are an ineffective and harmful tool for peace that is only a non-violent option for the sender states.