Opening New Doors: Coerciveness, Interdependence, and Third-Party States

• In Event: Foreign Policy & Comparative Politics in Advanced Industrial Societies & Ideas, Knowledge and Politics Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Foreign Policy: Competition and Rivalry in International Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

What roles do third party states play in the decisions of sanction-sending states? For a country utilizing sanctions to coerce, the economic pain that it could inflict on its target is important. While it is possible to determine economic damage done by sanctions ex post, it is more challenging to estimate the costs of severing ties ex ante. The degree of economic interdependence is crucial in such cases. However, economic interdependence has often been conceptualized as dependent solely on bilateral ties. Yet, the target-sender dyad does not exist in a vacuum. The severing of economic ties through sanctions also affects the strategies of third-party states. Much of the scholarship on economic sanctions and third-party states have been on the motivations of third-party states, particularly those that sanction-bust. This project proposes examining the upstream decisions of the sender state in greater detail instead. Third-party states do not just influence the efficacy of sanctions ex-post, they also play a crucial role in determining what type of sanctions, if any, are observed in the first place. The sender must thus account for the actions a strategic third-party state may take prior to deciding whether it would enact sanctions and balance for the additional costs of the third-party state’s actions with the potential benefits that it could derive from successfully changing the target’s behavior. Failure to consider the strategic third-party at the pre-sanctioning stage ignores the selection process that the sender state has already undertaken before even sanction threats were issued. Taking into account the varying motivations of third-party states, I formalize the trade-offs that the target, the sender, and the third-party states must each make through a game theoretic model. The framework is applied to U.S.-China competition in Southeast Asia. I also empirically test the implications of the model through a new measurement of economic coerciveness calculated using network analysis.

Author

• Pei-Yu Wei, Duke University