Targeted Sanctions and Serious and Organised Crime: The Role of Political Will

A new research paper by Dr Anton Moiseienko, Cathy Haenlein and Elijah Glantz (RUSI) explores the existing academic and media discussions of targeted sanctions against serious organised crime.

Sanctions are coming under increasing policy scrutiny - for instance, through the designation of transnational criminal networks as terrorist entities, the UK’s 2025 stand‑alone regime targeting organised immigration crime, and the G7’s endorsement of sanctions on migrant smuggling and human trafficking.

The new paper - Targeted Sanctions and Serious and Organised Crime: The Role of Political Will - highlights gaps in current scholarly thinking. It finds that while political will clearly shapes how SOC‑related sanctions are designed and implemented, it remains surprisingly under‑examined: often referenced only indirectly, yet leaving significant blind spots.

As part of a wider project, the paper asks: what drives governments; how are sanctions targeted; how do host countries respond to another state’s sanctions? Crucially, it asks how these responses affect the overall impact and effectiveness of sanctions.

The review finds that the field remains siloed and fragmented, with most studies focusing on individual crime types.

By mapping these gaps, the paper calls for a more cohesive and politically informed research agenda that recognises the central role of political will.

You can read the paper here, and find out more about the project - Assessing the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool to disrupt serious organised crime - here.