Targeted Sanctions and Elite Adaptation in Conflict Economies: Rethinking Coercive Leverage in South Sudan

This article develops adaptive sanctions evasion as an analytical lens for understanding sanctions design, elite behaviour, and regional evasion infrastructure in conflict economies. Rather than treating sanctions architecture and political economy: do targeted measures change elite behaviour in conflict economies? as a descriptive case, the manuscript argues that targeted sanctions do not fail simply because elites are resilient; they fail when coercive design is mismatched to the informal financial geography of conflict economies, allowing sanctioned actors to reroute mobility, assets, and commercial access through regional and offshore networks. Anchored in Sanctions effectiveness theory (Hufbauer, Schott & Elliott; Pape's critique; Targeted sanctions literature Biersteker, Tourinho & Eckert); political economy of compliance and evasion; game theory of strategic interaction under external constraint. the paper translates the topic brief into three linked questions: How have South Sudan's targeted sanctions regime (UNSC; U.S. Executive Orders) affected the financial and mobility calculations of designated individuals and through what mechanisms is compliance produced or evasion enabled? What is the relationship between the design features of sanctions regimes asset freezes versus travel bans versus arms embargoes; unilateral versus multilateral; narrow versus comprehensive and their effectiveness in changing elite incentive structures in conflict economies? How does regional sanction evasion infrastructure particularly through the UAE, Uganda, and Kenya enable South Sudanese sanctioned elites to maintain financial access despite formal asset freeze measures? Methodologically, it is organised around Structured analysis of UNSC and US Treasury OFAC designations and just