The advent of restrictive measures on the international stage has provided more power and authority to non-state actors. Whether private actors are willing and capable to cooperate with public authorities determines their success. Indirectly, the behavior of for-profit private actors has security implications on how effectively states can provide security to their own people.

This project will look at how private actors interpret, enforce, and comply with restrictive measures. The literature has focused on the role of private actors in the provision of public goods in domestic contexts, but less has been done when it comes to the role of for-profit private actors in the provision of security in foreign policy. In this field, the attention has almost exclusively been devoted to the study of Private Military and Security Companies, while the role of ‘less spectacular’ actors has been worrisomely overlooked.

We plan to advance our current understanding of how restrictive measures work by opening a new avenue of research into how private actors influence the execution of public policy. We intend to investigate how for-profit actors implement targeted sanctions and why they behave in the way they do. We will develop a theoretical framework that will include variables on the context in which for-profit actors operate, on the type of targeted sanctions and on the type of for-profit actors that is required to implement sanctions. By doing so, we will bring a new focus to the study of foreign policy by looking at for-profit actors as the locus of power in designing and implementing restrictive measures.

Our project aims at collaboration between practitioners and academics, to understand both theoretical aspects as well as everyday practice from for-profit private actors themselves. A journal special issue, as well as a series of popularization outputs, will be the outcome of the project.