Know Your Sanctions

For decades, academics and practitioners have studied sanctions from different angles – for scholars, sanctions were a foreign policy question; for compliance officers, a regulatory one. I analyze sanctions from both ends – as a PhD candidate at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, I research sanctions circumvention, third-country compliance, and geopolitical outcomes; as a CAMS- and CSS-certified sanctions specialist, I am focused on forward-looking risk assessment in times of global tensions.

Before my MSc at Tufts and PhD studies at Mason, I worked as a macroeconomist at Sberbank of Russia, including through the 2014-2015 OFAC and EU sectoral sanctions imposition. I also studied Mandarin in Beijing, published research in academic journals, and wrote for think tanks and business outlets.

Know Your Sanctions bridges academic literature findings into insights on why sanctions are imposed, how they get evaded, and how third countries navigate them, so that professionals in the fields of sanctions and geopolitical analysis can make more grounded risk assessments, and so that scholars can see how their work lands in practice.

This is not a regulatory alert blog; the purpose of this newsletter is to help compliance specialists, trade professionals, and geopolitical analysts navigate global tensions with academically grounded evidence behind their decisions.

Specific areas I will mostly focus on:

• Effectiveness and design of sanctions

• Sanctions evasion and third countries’ role

• Geoeconomics and statecraft

My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasilii-nosov/