The European Union (EU) is one of the world's most active imposers of foreign policy sanctions. By contrast, the EU has never used formal political sanctions against a member. Why does the EU favour sanctions as an instrument to deal with norm violations abroad, but not at home? The article argues that an understanding of sanctions as ostracism helps illuminate this discrepancy. Far from technical instruments that can be made to 'work' through improved design, sanctions are social instruments that operate through selective exclusion. An in-depth scrutiny of public justifications from the European institutions and individual politicians shows that both at home and abroad sanctions are strongly associated with ostracising attributes. However, whereas practical and symbolic distance-taking from the target is core for foreign policy sanctions, at home, the same ostracising properties run against the EU's traditional insistence on resolving disagreements through rational dialogue.

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This article offers a novel argument about regional sanctions as in-group peer review, drawing on an analogy from the world of academic publishing. Through their leaning on community-derived authority, equality before the peer, and constructive criticism, regional sanctions have a previously overlooked legitimacy advantage over out-group sanctions used by external actors. The article probes the empirical bearing of this argument for African Union (AU) sanctions against Egypt (2013) and Sudan (2019). Even in these contentious democratic crises, perceptions of sanctions in African media broadly support the theoretical intuition of regional sanctions as a form of peer review. It is, however, far from obvious that peer review leads to successful enforcement of democratic norms beyond urgent crisis. Pragmatic and resolution-oriented, AU sanctions aim at avoiding anarchy rather than at achieving flawless democracy.