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Abstract
What determines how economic sanctions affect their targets trade with other countries? A gap exists in the literature as to how third party states and firms respond to the imposition of sanctions on their trading partners and what motivates their responses. This project seeks to uncover whether commercial or security prerogatives primarily drive third party responses and what factors affect whether third parties adopt policies favoring the sender of the sanctions or their target. I draw on the liberal paradigm to develop a theory that explains how commercial constituencies affect the way third parties respond to the imposition of economic sanctions. The theory asserts that the security prerogatives of third party governments tend to be trumped by their constituencies commercial interests in shaping their responses. Counter-intuitively, I argue that countries allied to the state imposing the sanctions are, under some circumstances, more likely to increase their trade with their target after sanctions are imposed. I test my theory against a realist-based theory of sanctions-busting that is also developed in the dissertation. The empirical portion of the project employs a nested-analytic approach, conducting two large-n quantitative studies of how sanctions affect third party trade and two qualitative studies examining the third party responses to the American sanctions imposed against Iran and Cuba. The dissertation makes an important theoretical contribution by explaining why states engage in sanctions-busting behavior and in its exploration of the complex constraints that exist on the use of coercion in international politics. The study also yields policy-salient insights into what shapes how third parties respond to sanctions and which states are more likely to become sanctions-busters.