EU sanctions on Russia created concerns among its members. It is well known that sanctions impose a cost on their targets as well as on the senders, as lamented by European governments, but the costs of EU sanctions on its members have not been fully explored. This article intends to fill this gap by looking at the cost of EU sanctions on Russia. Who is bearing the cost among EU countries? This article argues that sanctions had a redistributive impact across the EU. Whereas exports fell for all countries, with Germany, Italy and Finland in the leading positions, the article shows that there are economic sectors that increased their exports to Russia after the imposition of sanctions, which occurred particularly in countries as Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. This conclusion is reached by looking at the export flows from individual EU member states divided by SITC sectors to Russia.

The decisions to impose sanctions on Russia and to lift them on Iran, in opposition to the wishes of the United States, contributed to the elevation of the profile of the European Union among the main global actors in international politics. However, the EU imposes sanctions since the spring of 1994, shortly after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. Even though the EU consequently has 26 years of experience herewith, EU sanctions have been mostly studied only on a case-by-case basis. The aim of this article is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the experience of the EU with sanctions. Specifically, it presents the results of a newly constructed database of EU autonomous sanctions constituted by 48 cases of these restrictive measures, which have been subdivided in 85 episodes. The analysis revolves around four questions that we asked in each case: when sanctions were in force, what type(s) were used, where the targets were located and why restrictive measures were imposed. The analysis of the empirical database leads to observations about the EU as an international actor and, more generally, on the trends vis-à-vis the utilisation of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument.

Whereas a number of studies have been conducted to investigate causal relations between individual conditions (e.g. trade relations and labour standards), there is a lack of consensus among practitioners and scholars about the conditions that favour or cause labour standards improvements and, specifically, it is still unclear whether the increasing pervasiveness of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) is conducive to enhancing labour conditions. The aim of this study is to shed light on whether labour clauses in FTAs are conducive to better labour standard practices, whether the content of a clause makes a difference, and whether changes have anything to do with other (external) pressures that play a role in changing labour standards. The main argument of the article is that FTAs do not play a determinant role in improving labour standards in signatory states. The analysis is done by looking at 13 FTAs signed by the United States with 19 countries. The United States is chosen because of its relatively extensive collection of FTAs including different conditions on labour standards. The empirical dataset is analysed with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method, which permits to trace the combined effect of independent variables rather than to focus on the direct and individual causality with each of them.

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United Nations sanctions have undergone profound transformations in the past two decades. In 1990, the UN Security Council imposed a general, comprehensive embargo on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. In 2015, there are 16 Sanctions Committees managing regimes that have little in common with the one imposed against Iraq in 1990. The measures imposed against Iraq were comprehensive, covering all goods coming in and out of the country, while sanctions imposed today are mostly against individuals, non‐state entities and are more limited in scope. This article aims to provide empirical and systematic evidence of some of the distinctive qualities of UN targeted sanctions. The analysis identifies three distinctive characteristics of targeted sanctions. First, targeting individuals and non‐state actors has permitted the use of sanctions in a wider range of crisis types. Second, the targets of sanctions are substantially different from comprehensive sanctions. Third, the form taken by sanctions is substantially different today from the trade embargoes imposed in the past. The author concludes that the Security Council should devote special attention to the designing and implementation phases of sanctions. The article makes use of the new database prepared by the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), which includes all cases of UN targeted sanctions.