Can an Eye for an Eye Turn the Whole World Sanctioned?

International sanctions have been an increasingly common tool for enforcinginternational norms of behavior, among other goals. There is continuing debateon what drives sanctioning behavior: while IR theories of sanctions have a longempirical history, more recent studies identify a need to extend these theoriesto better account for the endogenous nature of state sanction networks. Using acombination of network and IR-based insights, we aim to build a theory-driven,interpretable model of international sanctions that has high predictive utility.Using a separable version of dynamic network logistic regression, we test networktheories of “Matthew effects,” reciprocity, and previous state-level sanctioningactivity alongside traditional IR theories regarding the democratic peace, culturalor institutional similarity, power imbalance, and trade. Though we find thatmechanisms from established IR theories largely hold with the inclusion of networkendogeneity, endogenous network effects are more powerful than traditionalIR concepts for predictive accuracy of the sanctioning network. We also find considerabledifferences for factors driving the imposition of sanctions (tie formation)versus persistence of sanction regimes (persistence), pointing to the importanceof treating such effects separately.