Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

International Relations

Second Department

Economics

Reader 1

Professor Jennifer Taw

Reader 2

Professor Angela Vossmeyer

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Regime change may be sought in two primary ways, absent a turn to internal or external violence: through nonviolent resistance, from within, and sanctions, from abroad. This paper is about how those two pathways are intertwined. I challenge two different strands of the existing literature. First, I show that Liou et al. (2022)'s finding that sanctions increase the predicted probability of nonviolent resistance movement progress is subject to substantial upward bias from country heterogeneity. Incorporating country fixed effects, I show that sanctions, on average, have no statistically significant effect on resistance outcomes. Second, I challenge Chenoweth and Stephan (2008)'s argument that sanctions' null average effect means that they do not frequently shape resistance dynamics. I disentangle sanctions types to show that sanctions frequently influence nonviolent resistance movement progress and security force defections, although different types of sanctions push in opposing directions, yielding an average effect of zero. To explain the causal influences of sanctions on nonviolent contestation, I analyze three episodes where sanctions and resistance have intersected: Sudan from 2018-2020, Venezuela from 2017-2025, and Hong Kong from 2019-2020. Case study analysis reveals that differences in institutional makeup in sanctioned states---i.e., country heterogeneity---have profound effects on how sanctions influence contestation. I show that where target state institutions are designed to redistribute or filter the effects of sanctions, sanctions frequently fail to achieve either direct or indirect coercion. Even where target state institutions are not designed to filter sanctions, I show that sanctions rarely play out as anticipated and that their unanticipated effects have both sparked and undermined nonviolent resistance movements.

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