The Impact of Economic Sanctions on Autocratic Regime: Factors of Regime Strengthening

Sanctions - one of the most popular foreign policy tool. We can easily agree with this statement having ability to observe all the “breaking news” information about Russian-Ukrainian sanctions regime or conversation on Iranian sanctions relief during last year. Nevertheless, we can also name a great number of research proving the ineffectiveness of sanctions. Furthermore, some of the papers claim even the opposite effect of sanctions - in many cases autocracies strengthened under the sanctions. Our research focuses exactly on such results. The main research question is the following: If sanctions really have an effect of strengthening autocracies, under what conditions we can observe such outcomes and why? Searching for the answers, we will turn to the main theoretical background of autocracies and then try to test some of them on certain cases using Qualitative Comparative Analysis method. The first part of current paper is devoted to theoretical basis: monitoring some basic points on effectiveness of sanctions, fragmental theoretical background about autocracy. The second practical part of the paper observes our empirical strategy and defines data and cases for current research, presents results of analysis and its interpretation, and performs concluding remarks and observations for further research.