Sanctions Effectiveness, Development and Regime Type. Are Aid Suspensions and Economic Sanctions Alike?

The efficacy of international sanctions in bringing about compliance with the goals of the sender is of interest to both International Relations (IR) and development scholars. Yet, aid suspensions receive less attention in sanctions research than economic sanctions, which may be biasing our understanding of sanctions efficacy. Since recent research has established that different autocratic types display diverging degrees of resilience to sanctions, we ascertain whether such claims are applicable to aid suspensions. First, we look at how resilient different regime types are to sanctions and then investigate whether results for aid suspensions differ from those for sanctions in general. After that, we hypothesise that wealth protects autocracies less from aid suspensions than from other sanctions because their effects are harder to evade. With the help of econometric analysis, we test our hypotheses on original data that feature aid suspensions as a stand-alone category. Test results corroborate the superior resistance of single-party regimes and monarchies. A final test on the role of target prosperity uncovers a nuance: affluence strengthens target resistance to economic sanctions but not to aid suspensions. This confirms our evasion hypothesis: while alternative trade routes can offset a ban on trade with a set of senders, substitute donors are rare.