Economic Coercion in World Politics: With a Focus on North-South Relations

Earlier studies of economic sanctions underestimated the role and importance of more subtle forms of coercion because they concentrated attention on highly public, formally legislated attempts at economic coercion in world politics, such as the cases of Italy in the 1930s and Rhodesia since 1965. The author agrees with Galtung, Knorr, and others that in highly public cases, sanctions will often fail in their avowed political purpose because they actually stimulate nationalism and thus resistance in the target-state; he argues that in an increasingly (but unequally) interdependent world, relatively subtle sanctions can be politically effective—with only moderately purely economic effects—by exploiting the LDC's typically fragmented interest-group and class structure. In order to describe and explain how such economic coercion works, it is necessary to bridge several “islands” of literature: on economic sanctions, on the structure of dependency, and on the causes of political instability.