Economic Coercion

Economic coercion is a threatened or actual imposition of economic costs on one state by another with the objective of extracting a policy concession. While the first wave of research on economic coercion focused primarily on its effectiveness, more recently scholars broadened the scope of inquiry to include states’ motivations for using economic coercion, their choice of coercive instruments, and the scale of coercive efforts. In addition, scholars have evaluated a broad range of indirect and unintended outcomes of economic coercion. Overall, this field of International Political Economy (IPE) research is problem-driven; consequently, the shared focus on the use and outcomes of economic coercion results in a significant degree of engagement and collaboration among sanction scholars.