Sanctions and Democracy: The Limits of Peace

Scholars have argued whether democratic peace also holds in the realm of economic sanctions – whether there is an economic peace. Substantial amount of evidence has been gathered both for and against economic peace. This letter provides a new insight, with the use of the updated TIES data set, into the topic of economic peace. It finds that democracies are both more likely to issue economic sanctions and that there is no economic peace. In fact, the opposite holds and democracies are more likely to sanction one another. This letter indicates that absence of economic peace is driven the public opinion of the sender states and that the exercise of power among democracies has been rechannelled to economic coercion.