Sanctions, export controls, and financial coercion have become primary instruments of foreign policy. This program evaluates how these tools are designed, enforced, evaded, and whether they achieve their stated goals.
Economic statecraft research goes beyond cataloguing who is sanctioned. Quad Institute's approach — informed by established methodologies in the field — treats sanctions as a system to be measured: their design, their enforcement gaps, and the networks that emerge to evade them.
The Atlantic Council's Economic Statecraft Initiative runs its analysis through the Global Sanctions Dashboard, organized around three tracks: rolling "Sanctions Brief" analysis of new measures, an "Axis of Evasion" series examining cooperation among sanctioned regimes, and semi-annual in-depth assessments of both state and non-state targets. Quad Institute's own Global Sanctions Map will follow a comparable structure, adapted for our Indo-Pacific research focus.
Sanctions only work if they're enforced — and enforcement gaps are where adversarial regimes build resilience. Understanding how sanctioned states cooperate with each other, and where allied enforcement diverges, is essential to assessing whether economic statecraft is actually achieving its policy goals rather than just signaling intent.
Each sanctions regime is catalogued by issuing authority, target, legal basis, and stated policy objective.
Financial and trade flows among sanctioned states are tracked to identify emerging circumvention networks.
Semi-annual assessments compare stated sanctions goals against observed economic and diplomatic outcomes.