Determining the Success of Economic Sanctions

This article applies the social-network conception of national power, derived from the social-network conception of the international system structure, to economic sanctions, one of the most widely studied empirical phenomena in international relations. The empirical analyses of economic sanctions presented here find that sanctions cases with disproportional structural-network power between sender and target were far less likely to be successful and those with the target state possessing high structural-network power were far more likely to be successful. The evidence from nonparametric model discrimination statistics and information criteria measures shows that the sanctions models with new social-network power measures have greater explanatory power than or statistically outperform those with old attributional power measures, such as the Correlates of War index and GNP.