CTC South Asia expert Dr. Amira Jadoon has a forthcoming article co-authored with Bryan Early in Foreign Policy Analysis entitled “Using the Carrot as the Stick: U.S. Foreign Aid and the Effectiveness of Sanctions Threats.” Read their abstract below:
“We theorize that foreign aid relationships enhance sender states’ leverage in using sanctions threats to compel concessions from aid recipients. Aid sanctions tend to be far less costly for senders than imposing commercially-oriented sanctions, but can still be very costly for their targets. Being able to threaten aid cuts enhances sender states’ ability to convey their resolve to impose costly sanctions on target states. The more foreign aid a sender provide to a target state, the more successful we expect its sanctions threats to be and the more aggressive we expect the sender to be in imposing sanctions if the target resists the threat. We test our theory using a competing risks analysis of ongoing, politically-motivated sanctions threats issued by the United States from 1960-2010. Our main results and a wide array of robustness checks reveal that the more foreign aid that the U.S. provides to target states, the more likely U.S. sanctions threats are to succeed and the more aggressive the U.S. becomes in imposing sanctions.”
