Targeted Sanctions, Resource Substitution, and Violence Against Civilians: Localized Evidence from African States

Since the 1990s, the UN Security Council increased its use of targeted sanctions, yet we know very little about their unintended impact on civilian victimization, especially at the local level. This study argues that imposing sanctions on armed actors may compel them to seize non-sanctioned agricultural resources to replenish lost revenues and use violence to facilitate appropriation. A new dataset on sanctioned group violence in agricultural areas is developed by matching UN sanctions data with information on local attacks on civilians from the UCDP GED and combining these data with a new geographic dataset. Quantitative analyses establish that monthly changes in cash crop productivity affect political violence by sanctioned actors in Africa, while violence by unsanctioned and pre-sanctioned actors is unaffected. A short case study of Somalia validates the hypothesized mechanism by showing that al-Shabaab actively engaged in violence over such substitution dynamics.