My Economic Statecraft Syllabus

After 25 years as a professor, I am finally teaching a course about my dissertation topic

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

Longtime readers are aware that my day job is being a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School. I have taught a variety of courses over the years, but this semester I’ve developed a new course about economic statecraft. The irony of this is that this was the subject of my dissertation and first book — but it took me 25 years to even think about teaching this topic. The events of the past few years, however, have made it a topic that merits its own course.

I suspect many readers of Drezner’s World might be curious about what a course about economic statecraft would look like. Below are the key portions of the syllabus for those who are interested. Bear in mind that the course is aimed at masters students in international affairs. That means the readings are more scholarly than they would ordinarily be for an undergraduate class but contain more policy pieces than a class for doctoral students.

Enjoy!

OVERVIEW

For decades, economic statecraft was viewed as the forgotten stepchild of foreign policy analysis.  The threat or use of force was the ne plus ultra of international relations; economic sanctions were viewed as a symbolic afterthought.  Over the past three decades, however, the explosion of economic statecraft – specifically, economic sanctions – has required a rethink of this policy instrument.  The United Nations has routinized its implementation of targeted sanctions.  The United States foreign policy community has gone from being skeptical of sanctions to being enthusiastic and prolific in using this tool.  Other great powers, such as China, Russia, and the European Union, have become more active sanctioners.  Even middle-range powers like Serbia, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea have gotten in on the act. 

Just because there have been more sanctions does not necessarily mean there have been more successful sanctions.  Indeed, one of the paradoxes of economic statecraft seems to be that countries are most eager to apply sanctions in situations in which they are less likely to obtain concessions.  Why is this the case?  How has economic statecraft evolved? Where is it going in the future?  Has the economic pressure applied against Russia over that country’s invasion of Ukraine altered the sanctions landscape for good?

This course will offer a survey of analytical approaches to economic statecraft, as well as an assessment of prominent cases in economic history.  It starts with a conceptual survey of what is under the umbrella of “economic statecraft,” with a special attention to sanctions in particular.  The next section conducts a brief historical survey of sanctions, with a special emphasis on the cases that led to rethinks about the use of the policy option.  The last section considers current practices on sanctions, in the United States and elsewhere, with an eye on what the future holds.

ASSIGNED BOOKS

Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Abraham Newman, eds., The Uses and Abuse of Weaponized Interdependence (Washington:  Brookings Institution Press, 2021).

Bruce Jentleson, Sanctions: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2022).

Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2017).

COURSE OUTLINE

PART I:  CONCEPTS AND THEORY

1.     Introduction: the what and the why of economic statecraft

Jentleson, Sanctions, introduction and chapter one.

Nephew, The Art of Sanctions, introduction and chapter one.

Susan Hannah Allen and David J. Lektzian, “Economic Sanctions: A Blunt Instrument?” Journal of Peace Research 50 (January 2013): 121-135.

2.     Interdependence as the engine of economic statecraft

Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, “Power and Interdependence revisited,” International Organization 41 (Autumn 1987): 725-753.

Thomas Wright, “Sifting Through Interdependence,” The Washington Quarterly 36 (Winter 2013:  7-23.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence,” in Drezner, Farrell, and Newman. 

Victor Cha and Andy Lim, “Flagrant Foul: China’s Predatory Liberalism and the NBA,” The Washington Quarterly 42 (Winter 2020):  23-42.

3.     Theories of economic inducements

Miroslav Nincic, “The logic of positive engagement: dealing with renegade regimes,” International Studies Perspectives 7 (Winter 2006): 321-341.

Tuomas Forsberg, “Economic Incentives, Ideas, and the End of the Cold War: Gorbachev and German Unification,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7 (Spring 2005):  142-164. 

Miles Kahler and Scott Kastner, “Strategic uses of economic interdependence: Engagement policies on the Korean Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait,” Journal of Peace Research 43 (September 2006): 523-541.

4.     The prevalence of economic sanctions

James Lindsay, “Trade Sanctions as Policy Instruments: A Re-examination,” International Studies Quarterly, 30 (June 1986):  153-173.

Taehee Whang, “Playing to the Home Crowd? Symbolic Use of Economic Sanctions in the United States,” International Studies Quarterly 55 (September 2011): 787-801.

Edward Fishman, “Even Smarter Sanctions: How to Fight in the Era of Economic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 96 (November/December 2017):  102-110.

Daniel W. Drezner, “The United States of Sanctions.”  Foreign Affairs 100 (September/October 2021):  142-154.

5.     Economic sanctions as a tool of deterrence

Timothy Peterson, “Sending a Message: The Reputation Effect of U.S. Sanction Threat Behavior,” International Studies Quarterly 57 (December 2013): 672-682.

Nicholas Miller, “The Secret Success of Nonproliferation Sanctions,” International Organization 68 (September 2014): 913-944.

Shubhangi Pandey, “U.S. Sanctions on Pakistan and their Failure as Strategic Deterrent,” ORF Issue Brief no. 251, May 2018.

Victor Cha, “How to Stop Chinese Coercion:  The Case for Collective Resilience,” Foreign Affairs 102 (January/February 2023): 

6.     Economic statecraft as a tool of denial

Robert Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” International Security 22 (Fall 1997):  90-136.

Seema Gahlaut and Victor Zaborsky, “Do Export Control Regimes Have Members They Really Need?” Comparative Strategy 23 (January 2004): 73-91.

Cindy Whang, “The Challenges of Enforcing International Military-Use Technology Export Control Regimes: An Analysis of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 33 (2015):  114-139.

Sarah Bauerle Danzman and Emily Kilcrease, “The Illusion of Controls,” Foreign Affairs, December 30, 2022.   

7.     Economic statecraft as a tool of coercion

Jentleson, Sanctions, chapters two and three.

Kim Nossal, “International Sanctions as International Punishment,” International Organization 43 (Spring 1989): 301-322.

Jonathan Kirshner, “The Microfoundations of Economic Sanctions,” Security Studies 6 (Spring 1997): 32-64.

Daniel W. Drezner, “The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion,” International Organization 57 (Summer 2003):  643-659

Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright. "Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers." International Studies Quarterly 54 (June 2010): 335-359.

8.     The role of sanctions and the role of force

David Lektzian and Christopher Sprecher, “Sanctions, Signals, and Militarized Conflict,” American Journal of Political Science 51 (April 2007): 415-431.

Daniel McCormack and Henry Pascoe, “Sanctions and Preventive War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61 (September 2017): 1711-1739.

Emily Weinstein, “Making War More Difficult to Wage,” Foreign Affairs, July 15, 2022.

9.     Multilateral cooperation and economic sanctions

Lisa Martin, “Credibility, Costs, and Institutions: Cooperation on Economic Sanctions,” World Politics 45 (Spring 1993): 406-432.

Audie Klotz, “Norms and sanctions: lessons from the socialization of South Africa,” Review of International Studies 22 (April 1996): 173-190.

Bryan Early and Robert Spice, “Economic Sanctions, International Institutions, and Sanctions Busters: When Does Institutionalized Cooperation Help Sanctioning Efforts?” Foreign Policy Analysis 11 (July 2015): 339-360.

10.  Sanctions and the private sector

Doris Fuchs, “Commanding heights? The strength and fragility of business power in global politics.” Millennium 33 (June 2005): 771-801.

David Lektzian and Glen Biglaiser, “Investment, Opportunity, and Risk: Do US Sanctions Deter or Encourage Global Investment?” International Studies Quarterly 57 (March 2013): 65-78.

Colin Barry and Katja B. Kleinberg, “Profiting from Sanctions: Economic Coercion and US Foreign Direct Investment in Third-Party States." International Organization 69 (Winter 2015): 881-912.

Julia Morse, “Blacklists, Market Enforcement, and the Global Regime to Combat Terrorist Financing,” International Organization 73 (Summer 2019): 511-545.

11.  Reponses to economic statecraft

Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, chapters four and six.

Susan Hannah Allen, “Political Institutions and Constrained Response to Economic Sanctions,” Foreign Policy Analysis 4 (July 2008): 255-274.

Advice Chimbarange, Clemenciana Mukenge, and John Mutambwa, “Image Repair: Analysis of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe's Rhetoric Following Sanctions on Zimbabwe,” International Journal of Linguistics 5 (2013): 306-319.

Masha Hedberg, “The target strikes back: explaining countersanctions and Russia’s strategy of differentiated retaliation,” Post-Soviet Affairs 34 (January 2018): 35-54.

12.  The collateral damage of economic sanctions

Lori Buck, Nicole Gallant, and Kim Richard Nossal, “Sanctions as a Gendered Instrument of Statecraft: The Case of Iraq,” Review of International Studies 24 (January 1998): 69-84.

Peter Andreas, “Criminalizing Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and its Legacy,” International Studies Quarterly 49 (June 2005):  335-360.

Jerg Gutmann, Matthias Neuenkirch and Florian Neumeier, “Sanctioned to Death? The Impact of Economic Sanctions on Life Expectancy and its Gender Gap,” Journal of Development Studies 57: (January 2021): 139–62.

13.  The ethics of economic sanctions

Albert Pierce, “Just War Principles and Economic Sanctions,” Ethics & International Affairs 10 (March 1996): 99-113.

Joy Gordon, “Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics & International Affairs 13 (1999): 123-142.

Dursun Peksen, “Political Effectiveness, Negative Externalities, and the Ethics of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics & International Affairs 33 (September 2019): 279-289.

PART II:  HISTORY

14.  The modern origins of economic statecraft

Jentleson, Sanctions, chapter four

Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon, chapters one, two and four.

15.  Economic statecraft and the Cold War

Michael Mastanduno, “Strategies of Economic Containment: U.S. Trade Relations with the Soviet Union,” World Politics 37 (July 1985):  503-531.

Johan Galtung, “On the Effects of International Economic Sanctions, with Examples from the Case of Rhodesia,” World Politics 19 (April 1967): 378-416.

16.  The Iraq sanctions

Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, chapter two.

George Lopez and David Cortright, “Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked,” Foreign Affairs 83:  (July/August 2004):  90-103.

Euclid Rose, “From a Punitive to a Bargaining Model of Sanctions: Lessons from Iraq,” International Studies Quarterly 49 (September 2005):  459-479.

Michael Spagat, “Truth and Death in Iraq Under Sanctions,” Significance 7 (September 2010): 116-120.

17.  Smart sanctions and targeted sanctions

Daniel W. Drezner, “Sanctions Sometimes Smart:  Targeted Sanctions in Theory and Practice.”  International Studies Review 13 (February 2011):  96-108.

Katrin Eggenberger, “When is blacklisting effective? Stigma, sanctions, and legitimacy: the reputational and financial costs of being blacklisted,” Review of International Political Economy 25 (July 2018): 483-504.

Daniel Ahn and Rodney Ludema, “The sword and the shield: The economics of targeted sanctions,” European Economic Review 130 (November 2020):  1-21.

18.  The emergence of weaponized interdependence

Drezner, Farrell, and Newman, The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, chapters one, three, ten, eleven, and twelve.

Grégoire Mallard and Jin Sun, “Viral Governance: How Unilateral U.S. Sanctions Changed the Rules of Financial Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 128 (July 2022):  144-188.

PART III:  MODERN PRACTICE

19.  The mechanics of economic statecraft

Sue Eckert, “The Evolution and Effectiveness of UN Targeted Sanctions,” in Research Handbook on UN Sanctions and International Law, pp. 52-70. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017.

Bryan Early and Keith Preble, “Going Fishing versus Hunting Whales: Explaining Changes in how the U.S. Enforces Economic Sanctions,” Security Studies 29 (March 2020): 231-267.

Victor Ferguson, “Economic Lawfare: The Logic and Dynamics of Using Law to Exercise Economic Power,” International Studies Review 24 (September 2022): viac032.

20.  How the United States practices economic statecraft

Jentleson, Sanctions, chapter five.

Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, chapters three, five, seven and eight.

Government Accountability Office, “Economic Sanctions,” GAO-20-324, March 2020.

Andrey Tomashevskiy, “Economic Statecraft by Other Means: The Use and Abuse of Anti-Bribery Prosecution,” International Studies Quarterly 65 (June 2021):  387-400.

21.  How China practices economic statecraft

Jentleson, Sanctions, chapter six.

Christina Lai, “Acting one way and talking another: China’s coercive economic diplomacy in East Asia and beyond,” The Pacific Review 31 (March 2018):  169-187.

Deborah Brautigam, “A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: The rise of a meme,” Area Development and Policy 5 (January 2020): 1-14.

Audrye Wong. “How Not to Win Allies and Influence Geopolitics: China's Self-Defeating Economic Statecraft.” Foreign Affairs 100 (May/June 2021): 44-53.

22.  How other states practice economic statecraft

Jentleson, Sanctions, chapter seven and eight.

Nikhil Kalyanpur and Abraham Newman, “Mobilizing Market Power: Jurisdictional Expansion as Economic Statecraft,” International Organization 73 (Winter 2019): 1-34.

Alena Vieira and Syuzanna Vasilyan, “Armenia and Belarus: Caught between the EU's and Russia's conditionalities?” European Politics and Society 19 (August 2018):  471-489.

Beverley Milton-Edwards, “The Blockade on Qatar: Conflict Management Failings,” The International Spectator 55 (April 2020): 34-48.

23.  The end of weaponized interdependence?

Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, chapter nine and conclusion.

Drezner, Farrell, and Newman, The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, chapters thirteen and sixteen.

Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “U.S. Sanctions Reinforce the Dollar’s Dominance,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. w29943, April 2022.

Barry Eichengreen, “Sanctions, SWIFT, and China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System,” CSIS Marshall Papers, May 2022.

Agathe Demarais, “The End of the Age of Sanctions?” Foreign Affairs, December 27, 2022.

24.  The Russia case: a debate