The effects of economic sanctions on target countries a PRISMA-compliant scoping review of the case studies literature

Sanctions, also referred to as restrictive measures, have become an ever-important foreign policy tool. They intend to target a country, entity or individual to achieve a (policy) goal, and can take various forms with various objectives. This paper conducts a PRISMA-compliant scoping review of existing case studies to investigate socio-economic consequences of sanctions and to assess sanction effectiveness. The review focusses on Iran, North Korea (DPRK), and the Russian Federation (Russia) in the post-Cold War era. To this end, we perform a systematic search in four bibliographic databases to select peer-reviewed articles containing case study evidence of sanction impacts or effectiveness. Our analysis retains 131 publications for this review. In addition, we enrich the results of the literature review with relevant sanction case data from leading sanction databases. By combining these data sources, we generate a comprehensive overview of the existing case studies on sanctions’ socio-economic consequences and showcase sanction effectiveness by mapping factors influencing sanction success. These findings improve our understanding of the diverse impacts of sanctions and factors influencing their effectiveness. The insights obtained enable us to suggest topics for further research and to identify potential policy gaps.