Countries use economic sanctions as a way to force their opponents to make policy concessions. Such external pressure may, as the designers of sanctions often intend, affect the degree of domestic support for the target's political leaders. It may even threaten the leaders' survival in office. We investigate how these dual pressures-preference for policy concessions and concern about target leaders' political future-shape the use of sanctions in the context of political relations between the sanctioning and sanctioned countries. The political relations between the two countries matter because a decline in the likelihood of the target leader's political survival results in a cost for the sanctioner when the target is a friendly regime and generates a benefit when the targeted regime is an adversary. Therefore, we argue, and show statistically, that economic coercion is more likely for friendly governments when they are politically stable and unfriendly governments when they are politically vulnerable. We illustrate our causal mechanism using declassified primary sources for two case studies of US sanctions against Chile.

In the past 25 years, the United Nations has sanctioned 28 rebel groups in 13 civil wars. Have the UN sanctions been effective in meeting the goal of conflict reduction? In this article, we argue that UN sanctions are effective to the extent that they can constrain and weaken some rebel groups. But this constraining effect can only occur when UN sanctions curtail rebel groups’ ability to adapt. For less adaptable groups, UN sanctions can trigger a causal chain of depressed rebel income, territorial losses, and battlefield defeats that leads to conflict reduction. This adaptability is the key to the understanding of UN sanctions’ effectiveness in conflict reduction, as rebel groups often engage in illegal and criminal economic activities and many of them are ‘Hydra-like’, being able to shift their income sources in response to sanction measures. As evidence of how UN sanctions can trigger these conflict dynamics, we first perform negative binomial regression on all civil war cases. We then proceed to provide more detailed evidence for our causal chain by conducting time-series intervention analysis on two sanctioned rebel groups: UNITA in Angola and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Our work is the first systematic quantitative analysis of UN sanctions’ effects on rebel groups, and the results have implications for the viability of economic coercion as a means to intervene into civil conflicts.

Past research has argued that leaders care about their post-tenure fates and that consideration of these circumstances can motivate policy choices. But, so far, there has been little theorizing on why some successors let leaders walk away while others meet more dismal ends. I provide a regime-based argument for this variation that predicts that personalist leaders will be more likely to experience negative post-tenure fates (exile, imprisonment, and death) than democratic and other autocratic counterparts. The reason is that personalist leaders’ legitimacy is uniquely tied to their personal traits. So long as the former despot is living and near, he poses a threat to his successors. I test my argument on a sample of leaders (1945–2004) and find that the legitimacy argument predicts leader outcomes even while accounting for rival arguments such as a need for retribution, means of exit, militarization of regime, and past history.

On the development of international law and judicial institutions over the past few decades see (Abbott 2000, Keohane, et al. 2000). On the development of "new style" ICs that give individuals a right to launch cases (in criminal cases, a prosecutor) see Alter (2011). 9 See for example the Statement of Norway, Nov. 12, 2001, available at http://www.iccnow.org/documents/Norway6thComm12Nov01.pdf.

To answer the symposium’s thematic question — ‘Who’s afraid of the International Criminal Court?’ — we offer an explanation as to how deterrence might work in the case of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) preliminary examination cases. We argue that, as long as conflict actors are aware of the Court’s influence and wary of the social and political repercussions associated with the broader anti-impunity norm, the Court can exert influence on the conflict actors’ behaviour. We examine and trace these actors’ responses to ICC’s actions during the Colombian conflict, the ICC’s longest running preliminary examination case. The analysis demonstrates that over the course of the conflict’s history, the main belligerents were not necessarily afraid of the Court, but they were aware and wary of the ICC’s influence, and that in turn, this caution reshaped their conflict behaviours and resulted in institutional changes that increased accountability in Colombia. The finding carries implications for the role of the Court in a time when the power of global justice is being questioned.