Targeted Sanctions

After having worked on understanding and assessing sanctions, I am currently working on EU sanctions, on the interaction between sanctions and other foreign policy initiatives, and I am looking at the role of for-profit actors in the implementation of sanctions.

EU Restrictive Measures

The European Union has emerged as one of the most active actors worldwide when it comes to resorting to targeted sanctions. My research investigates aspects linked to the experience of the EU, such as effectiveness and redistributive impact of imposing sanctions. Especially, the EU sanctions practice is different from other senders, such as states and conventional international organizations, precisely due to its hybrid nature. This ‘uniqueness’ has influenced both the way in which global practices of targeted sanctions have developed and has inspired new ways of understanding how foreign policy can be conducted. I investigate whether this peculiarity is the result of a specific institutional framework existing in the European Union system of governance or whether other causes are at play.

Sanctions and other foreign policy instruments.

What do we do when we impose sanctions? What is the impact of other foreign policy initiatives on sanctions? And what about the other way around? While most scholars focus on whether sanctions work, my research interest revolves around the interaction between different foreign policy initiatives. On the one hand, I am investigating whether foreign aid do work coherently with sanctions to achieve foreign policy objective or whether they undermine each other. On the other hand, sanctions is the stick in foreign policy, but conflicts are solved thanks to mediation efforts. Do sanctions help or undermine efforts to mediate conflicts?

Firms, companies and sanctions implementation.

The Office for Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has imposed several ‘fines’ on companies because they violated sanctions regulations. Why? If companies are business-oriented actors, why should they follow sanctions regulations? In fact, while it is governments that decide the imposition of sanctions, part of the implementation burden falls on the shoulders of firms and companies. My research aims to understand when private actors determine the outcome of sanctions that differ from the one imagined by public authorities imposing sanctions.