Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Bargaining and Economic Coercion

这一研究项目致力于确定各国威胁、实施和解除国际经济制裁的条件，以及制裁可能成功实现其政治目标的条件。了解制裁进程很重要，因为经济制裁是广泛使用的外交政策工具，其适用速度不断提高--一个内容翔实的全面经济制裁理论不仅将构成学术贡献，而且还将为实际使用经济杠杆以获取政治让步提供一些指导。这个项目提供了这样一个理论，其关键创新之处在于，尽管以前的研究大多逐一考察制裁的威胁、施加、终止和成功，但这里所有这些制裁方面都集成到一个单一的理论框架中。联合研究这些方面，不仅可以解释制裁进程的这些方面是如何相互联系的，而且还可以更好地解释每个方面本身。首先，各国被认为会诉诸经济胁迫，以改善在有争议的政策问题上的讨价还价地位。其次，发生实际的经济制裁，而不是简单的威胁，是因为争端国家对其决心的不确定性，因为忍受制裁的代价有助于以可信的方式传达这种决心。该项目分析了两种正式的经济胁迫模型，它们在后一种前提下产生了一些新的见解。其目的是使用经济制裁(TIES)的威胁和实施数据集来评估这些模型的影响，并辅之以额外的数据，以评估这些模型产生的解释除了在理论上具有说服力外，是否也具有经验有效性。到目前为止，制裁文献中的主要问题是，各国是否可以利用制裁来迫使其他国家改变其政策。另一方面，该项目还提出了更复杂的问题，如各国诉诸军事胁迫的机会如何影响经济胁迫的影响、制裁威胁的失败对后续制裁的成功和持续时间意味着什么，以及与解除经济制裁有关的协议的性质如何取决于解除制裁的时机。这些问题的答案都是相互依存的，都来自一个单一的理论框架。反过来，这一单一框架被用来得出具体的解释，说明制裁持续时间的差异、制裁结果随时间的变化、武力使用的升级以及威胁和制裁结果的变化。总而言之，概述的研究项目不仅将在理论上为制裁文献做出贡献，为该领域提供新的数据，还将提供一些违反直觉的政策建议。其中，该项目提出，与传统看法相反，增加制裁成本在某个门槛之后没有什么不同，制裁国家可以通过实施目标狭隘的“聪明”制裁来避免额外成本，这种制裁与较小的成本不确定性相关，而且，与传统观点相反，如果制裁确实奏效，制裁更有可能在实施之后更早而不是更晚发生。

This research project undertakes to identify the conditions under which countries threaten, impose, and lift international economic sanctions, as well as the conditions under which sanctions are likely to succeed in accomplishing their political goals. Understanding the sanctions process is important because economic sanctions are widespread foreign policy instruments that are applied at ever-increasing rates - an informative and comprehensive theory of economic sanctions will not only constitute an academic contribution, but will also provide some guidance regarding the practical use of economic leverage to extract political concessions. This project offers such a theory, the key innovation being that while previous research has mostly looked into the threat, imposition, termination, and success of sanctions one at a time, here all these sanction aspects are integrated into a single theoretical framework. Studying these aspects jointly makes it possible, in turn, not only to explain how these aspects of the sanctions process are interrelated, but also to explain better each individual aspect itself.The theory advanced here is based on two central premises. First, countries are assumed to resort to economic coercion to improve their bargaining position over disputed policy issues. Second, the occurrence of actual economic sanctions, rather than simply threats, is explained by the disputing countries' uncertainty about their resolve, as enduring the sanctions costs helps to communicate that resolve in a credible manner. The project analyzes two formal models of economic coercion, which generate a number of novel insights based on the latter premises. The intention is to evaluate the models' implications using the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) dataset, complemented by additional data, in order to assess whether, in addition to being theoretically compelling, the explanations generated by the models are also empirically valid.The main question in the sanctions literature has by far been whether countries can use sanctions to coerce other countries into changing their policies. This project, on the other hand, also asks more complicated questions such as how countries' opportunities to resort to military coercion affect the impact of economic coercion, what the failure of a sanctions threat implies for the success and duration of subsequent sanctions, and how the nature of the agreement associated with the lifting of economic sanctions depends on the timing of that lifting. The answers to these questions are all interdependent and drawn from a single theoretical framework. In turn, this single framework is used to derive specific explanations that account for the differences in the duration of sanctions, the variation in the sanctions outcome over time, the escalation to the use of military force, and the variation in the outcomes of threats and sanctions.In conclusion, the outlined research project will not only contribute theoretically to the sanctions literature and enrich the field with new data, but will also provide a number of counter-intuitive policy recommendations. Among these, the project suggests, contrary to conventional wisdom, that increasing sanctions costs makes no difference after a certain threshold, that sanctioning countries can avoid extra costs by applying narrowly targeted, "smart" sanctions, which are associated with a smaller cost uncertainty, and, again contrary to conventional wisdom, that if sanctions do work, this is more likely to happen sooner rather than later after their imposition.