Understanding EU sanctioning behavior
Understanding EU sanctioning behavior

Summary/Abstract: The European Union may impose sanctions in the absence of a mandate by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), or after the UNSC has agreed its own measures. This creates a situation in which the UN and the EU enact sanctions in parallel. One of the issues that research on sanctions has not yet ascertained is their relation to UNSC sanctions. What impact does the imposition of UN sanctions have on the behavior of the EU as a sender of sanctions? In the present paper, we seek to address this gap by exploring the impact of UN sanctions on EU sanctions enactment. To this aim, we develop assumptions that relate the likelihood of the EU enacting measures in the absence or in the presence of UN sanctions to the nature of the objectives followed. Equally, we relate EU behavior in the easing, escalation and termination of its sanctions to the concurrent presence or absence of UN measures. We test our hypotheses on a new data set on economic sanctions for the period 1989-2015 (EUSANCT) which integrates and updates existing sanctions data sets, thanks to which we obtain fresh results.

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