CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Berezutskii, Anton |
|---|---|
| Title | Targeted Sanctions and the Survival of Autocracies: the Case of Russia |
| Summary | After the end of the Cold War sanctions became an increasingly important tool of international politics. In general, the imposition of sanctions pursues three possible goals: to signal, to constrain, and to coerce the targeted state in order to change its objectionable behavior. Existing studies show that the effectiveness of sanctions is largely determined by which type of political regime is targeted. The general consensus in the scholarly literature is that non-democracies are more resistant to sanctions than democratic governments since the former are able to mobilize and redistribute the resources to compensate the sanctions damages and prevent the risks of revolt within (by cooptation) and outside (by repression) its winning coalition. Since 2014, a number of Russian foreign policy actions led to the imposition of sanctions against it by Western countries. Sanctions did not lead to the desired change in Russia's foreign policy, but had a cumulative negative effect on its economy. In the same period the political regime in Russia continued to move towards further autocratization. This thesis analyzes the impact of sanctions on the strategies of repression, co-optation and legitimation which are used by authoritarian regimes to remain in power. Using the process-tracing method, the study shows that sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions led to the shift from the performance-based legitimation towards the model of the ‘besieged fortress’, the weakening of elites oriented towards incorporation into international cooperation and international institutions, and the strengthening of elites oriented towards the further securitization of domestic politics. |
| Supervisor | Schneider, Carsten Q. |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/berezutskii_anton.pdf |
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