ABSTRACT
This chapter critically reviews conceptualizations of coercive international sanctions in the literature. It recognizes the important findings of existing work, but criticizes the widespread subscription to a simplistic sender–receiver model of communication: first, the idea that economic or other measures as part of sanctions and the political demands attached to them unequivocally ‘transmit’ to a ‘target’; second, the broadly assumed model of economic impact translating into political pressure along a simplistic input/output scheme. The review notes the limitations of the rationalist-positivist models of economistic approaches to sanctions, resulting from underlying methodological individualist assumptions.
