| Summary/Abstract |
Drawing heavily on theories about Russia's informal politics, American sanctions were designed to change Russian foreign policy by exploiting political conflict among oligarchs and the state elite; however, after nearly eight years of sanctions, Russian elites seem more united than ever. I propose that Russia's oligarchs—the ruthless self-interested economic elite in Russia's informal political system—might sometimes act as a cohesive oligarchy, particularly when their wealth is threatened from external rather than domestic sources, as has been the case under Western sanctions. Through an in-depth case study on the design and outcome of sanctions, this article seeks to develop a more dynamic theory of Russia's informal politics and explain the apparent cohesion among state and economic elites since 2014 as the result of a politics of wealth defense induced by Western sanctions.
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