The Colonial Origins of American Coercion: Extractive Institutions, Geopolitical Alignment, and U.S. Sanction Selection

This thesis examines how colonial legacy influences contemporary foreign policy alignment and, through it, vulnerability to U.S. economic sanctions. Using a personally developed country-year&nbsp;<br />panel spanning 1980&ndash;2005, I argue that the institutional inheritance of extractive colonialism &mdash; characterized by concentrated resource extraction, weak domestic sovereignty, and dependent economic integration (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001) &mdash; systematically orients postcolonial states toward Russia (as proxied by UN General Assembly voting), and that this alignment in turn increases their likelihood of U.S. sanction targeting. I employ OLS regression in the first stage and an IV probit estimator in the second stage, with year fixed effects, controlling for GDP per capita and regime type, as well as additional WDI indicators including trade openness, natural resource rents, and FDI inflows in the robustness checks. I find that extractive colonies align with Russia at rates approximately 9.0 percentage points higher than never-colonized states, and that this gap is most pronounced during the Cold War period (18.5 percentage points), drastically attenuating after 1991 as bloc discipline dissolved and alignment patterns converged&nbsp;<br />across colonial types. The sanctions analysis yields robust results: instrumented Russia alignment is a statistically significant predictor of U.S. sanction targeting, however its effect is negative and&nbsp;<br />the IV strategy is not well-identified in the post&ndash;Cold War period where the first-stage F-statistic falls below conventional thresholds. These findings suggest that colonial institutional legacy may&nbsp;<br />influence U.S. foreign policy responses through channels beyond formal sanction targeting &mdash; states whose alignment reflects extractive colonial inheritance may face alternative forms of U.S.&nbsp;<br />coercion or discipline that render economic sanctions a less likely instrument. This thesis contributes to the intersecting literatures on the political economy of sanctions by foregrounding colonial legacy as an antecedent to both foreign policy orientation and coercive statecraft.