Abstract

Statecraft is the practice of advancing the chosen interests of a state’s leaders and the coalitions that keep them in power. The dominant foreign policy interests within a state typically include maintaining the state’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, promoting the state’s economic well-being, expressing the state’s ideology, and undermining other states’ territorial integrity and sovereignty for economic, security, and domestic-political reasons. Leaders pursue their interests using a variety of policy tools, including diplomacy, economic sanctions, economic inducements, and military force. In this chapter, we focus on economic sanctions, bearing in mind that they are often used in conjunction with other foreign policy tools.