News & Events

Join us for 'Regional sanctions governance: cooperation, leadership and adaptation' with Iana Ovsiannikova.

When: 1-2pm, Friday, 6 February 2026

Where: Seminar Room, Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway

Regional sanctions governance: cooperation, leadership and adaptation

Recently, there has been a surge in the use of economic sanctions, whether imposed by states or regional organisations. They are used as a tool to address breaches of international law, domestic conflicts or promote democracy and governance objectives. This phenomenon creates implications for global governance structures and regional actors in the geographical realm of the country targeted by such sanctions. This paper analyses regional agency in response to sanctions through three theoretical mechanisms: coordination, leadership and adaptation. Overpassing the Western-centric binary of target-sanctioning state relations, this paper puts forward the agency of regions. Looking at Africa and Central Asia, this paper discusses how regions interact with sanctions, and asks the broader question of whether sanctions stipulate any process of regionalisation across various axes of sanctions.

Speaker Bio:

Iana Ovsiannikova is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University affiliated with United Nations University-Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS). Iana’s research focuses on regional sanctions governance, namely, how sanctions shape regional agency. Within the scope of her doctoral research, Iana explores regional leadership in the UN Security Council sanctions on African countries, the role of sanctions in regional governance and how sanctions impact regional political and institutional frameworks in Central Asia in view of the EU's more assertive use of positive incentives and secondary sanctions. Her other research interests include human rights accountability via sanctions and the role of regional organisations in peace building and post-conflict transition.

Iana obtained her MA degree in EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies at the College of Europe where she performed comparative research on the EU and UK sanctions policies after Brexit on the case study of Belarus. In the past two years, she worked as an expert and project manager at a development cooperation consultancy based in Brussels, working on EU-funded projects on CSOs, transitional justice and media support in Africa.