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After the end of the Cold War, the use of economic sanctions between great powers was limited. In particular, broad, non-targeted sanctions were avoided in order to encourage economic development through free trade. However, beginning in the 2000's, a new trend of increasing economic restrictions emerged, and following the 2014 Russian annexation of Sevastopol and Crimea, this trend accelerated, including impositions of large-scale economic coercion attempts between great powers, targeting Russia in particular. The shift was further solidified by European and American responses to the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine consisting of broad denial-type sanctions aiming to curtail the Russian war effort and negatively impact its economic development. In light of these developments, this thesis argues that the conventional approaches of Foreign Policy Analysis and International Political Economy within sanctions research lack the necessary theoretical tools to account for this shift and the implications of a full return of security-centric great-power politics to the post-2022 global economic landscape.

This thesis aims to contribute to the filling of this research gap by using grand-narrative-type International Relations theories to explain the sanctioning behaviour of the European Union in its economic coercion efforts towards the Russian Federation over the last decade, 2014-2024. This has been done using a deductive theory-testing design, examining four prominent International Relations theories against one-another to provide a sound qualitative assessment of post-analysis confidence in their validity, following Bayesian logic.

In light of the analysis performed, the thesis argues that the most promising theoretical approaches tested were those of constructivism and liberalism, concluding that further research into inter-great-power sanctioning behaviour using these two theories as starting points are likely to prove fruitful endeavours. The thesis also argues that the analysis shows that grand-narrative-type International Relations theories are indeed able to be used in the study of economic statecraft and sanctions, lending support to the claim that this approach can complement the mid-range theories of Foreign Policy Analysis by providing the much needed context of system-level inter-state competition necessary to understand sanctions as one of many tools of foreign policy, rather than as an isolated phenomenon.