Maritime sanctions evasion: a theory-informed narrative review of mechanisms, governance gaps and evasion capabilities

Despite its growing relevance for global security, energy markets, and maritime governance, research on maritime sanctions evasion remains fragmented across sanctions studies, maritime operations, financial crime, and supply-chain governance. This theory-informed narrative review synthesises 49 academic and policy sources to examine how evasion is enabled by the interaction of governance vulnerabilities, corporate opacity, fleet capacity, market access, and operational deception. Using capability-based logic as its primary theoretical orientation, the paper develops an Evasion Capability Framework that interprets maritime sanctions evasion as the assembly and recombination of regulatory-arbitrage, corporate-opacity, fleet-capacity, market-access, and operational-concealment capabilities under enforcement pressure. Through comparative discussion of Russia, Iran, and the DPRK, the review suggests that Russia’s post-2022 shadow fleet is distinctive less because it uses wholly novel tactics than because familiar evasion capabilities have been recombined at scale within global energy markets. The review contributes by synthesising fragmented scholarship, clarifying the capability logic of maritime sanctions evasion, and identifying testable research directions for future empirical work.