MIDs, Economic Sanctions, and Trade: The Effect of Economic Coercion on Military Disputes.

We explore the relationship between economic sanctions and militarized conflict by analyzing the coercive options leaders have in a dispute with another nation. Although often argued to be ineffective and perhaps a path to military conflict, economic coercion is one of the most widely used tools in interstate disputes. However, the sanction literature has not empirically investigated the connection between economic sanctions and military conflict. Similarly, studies of militarized disputes tend not to ask whether less violent foreign policy measures were used prior to the onset of militarized hostilities. Insight into the role of non-military coercion prior to a militarized dispute would provide significant benefits to both our understanding of military conflict and economic coercion. We attempt to shed light on this issue by analyzing the role economic sanctions play in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). We assert that sanctions are more complementary policies to military action than they are substitutable alternatives. Further, disputes in which economic coercion is used will tend to be more severe because the two actors have built up a hostile relationship and used a variety of coercive measures against one another. We test these assertions by adding sanction data to the conventional conflict model found in the liberal peace research program (Russett and Oneal, 2001; Oneal and Russett, 2003). Additionally, we create several proxies to validate the use of sanctions by the disputants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]