Topic of the thesis: The Politics of Sanctions Compliance.

Abstract: Sanctions scholarship overwhelmingly expects that authoritarian states defy and resist the demands attached to international sanctions imposed on them. In practice, however, authoritarian states do sometimes accommodate to sanctions-related demands and offer political concessions consistent with them. What explains their choice of compliance or defiance? When do they decide to offer concessions, and why do those decisions vary across time, even across the same kind of regime? This research project argues that the answer depends on the target country's configuration of domestic veto players, a function of the distribution of their policy preferences and of the effect sanctions-related costs may have, sometimes unequa lly, on them. In order to do so, the project first illustrates why the use of a veto players' perspective helps capture how power operates inside a country targeted by sanctions better than traditional regime type explanations. Having clarified that, the project also intends to expose the limits of existing sanctions scholarship which has exceptionally tried to resort to the concept of veto players. Building on these limits, it then introduces a new framework which is theoretically richer and also more appropriate to investigate some empirical anomalies previous research left unexplained. The new framework aims to investigate precisely how the configuration of domestic veto players in a country targeted by international sanctions affects the effectiveness of sanctions, here understood as consisting of three dimensions and thus defined as the probability of the target country to offer political concessions which are aligned to the sender's demands; expedite; and robust. The empir ical analysis of the cases of Eritrea, Iran, and Sudan aims to explore how this argument outperforms explanations that instead either focus only on regime type or overlook the full potential of the theory of veto players in decoding sanctions effectiveness.
Research Interests: Foreign Policy Analysis, International Relations, Political Science, Sanctions, Political Violence.

Graduated from: Bachelor's degree from the Catholic University of Milan Master's degree from the University of Pavia.

Degrees obtained: Bachelor's degree in Foreign Languages Master's degree in World Politics and International Relations.

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