Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions.

• Author: McAllister, James

Lisa Martin's Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions is an ambitious book that will be of great interest to both theorists and practitioners of international relations. The subject of economic sanctions, of course, is hardly an understudied topic. Within the last decade alone two classic books have been published on the subject: David Baldwin's Economic State-craft and Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott's Economic Sanctions Reconsidered.(1) As Martin points out, however, economic sanctions now merit even greater study because the end of the Cold War will probably increase the relevance of sanctions in world politics. As seen by both the debate over the utility of sanctions before the Persian Gulf War and the more recent conflict over how the international community should respond to Serbian aggression, it is clear that the issue of sanctions remains highly contentious among both scholars and policy makers.

Most studies of economic sanctions are concerned with the issue of whether the target of the efforts to impose sanctions changes its behavior as a result of national or international pressure. Instead of exploring this question, Coercive Cooperation focuses on the prior but no less important, question of how cooperation is achieved among the nations imposing sanctions. This focus adds greatly to the book's value, because Martin's hypotheses and evidence can be extended far beyond the specific issue area of economic sanctions. Even scholars uninterested in sanctions will find this book useful in that it adds empirical insights into some of the more enduring theoretical debates in the field.

A good example of how Coercive Cooperation contributes to other theoretical debates lies in Martin's test of the declining hegemony thesis. Contrary to what one would expect from the arguments of hegemonic stability theorists, Martin shows that the United States has actually received more international support for its efforts to impose sanctions in recent years than it did in the immediate postwar period. Leaving aside the contentious debates over whether U.S. power has actually declined, Martin's evidence provides some empirical support for the counterintuitive theoretical arguments of scholars who have suggested that a declining hegemon might actually gain more cooperation from other states than it did during the era when its preponderance of power was unquestioned.

Martin advances two major arguments about the utility of...