Financial Sanctions have become a major component of American foreign policy. Since 2015, the number of blacklisted actors has nearly tripled, coinciding with US financial campaigns against Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Financial sanctions often limit the economic benefits promised to target states, as banks and other financial institutions risk hefty material and reputational costs if they are to cooperate with previously sanctioned actors. However, while financial sanctions are effective at producing negative market reactions against a target, they can be hugely damaging if market actors do not cooperate with the lifting of sanctions, and previously-sanctioned economies may struggle to recover economically. This dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach to assess why some economies fail to recover after the removal of financial sanctions, while others do not. I assess three key variables – political risk, state signaling, and reputational risk – and how such variables impact on market actors’ investment decision-making toward post-sanction economies. This dissertation finds that high levels of reputational risk in post-sanction economies is highly-correlated with failed economic recovery.

From entering legislatures to joining presidential cabinets, greater women’s political empowerment is widely understood as critical for making peace last after wars end. Women leaders tend to invest more in health, education and other social welfare programs, elevating levels of development and stability. However, most research on women’s political empowerment focuses on peacetime, leaving little understanding of how the phenomenon transpires in the fragile post-conflict period. Recent research acknowledges the end of conflict as an opportunity for expanding empowerment, but scholars have little understanding of how it is achieved or why it happens so infrequently. This dissertation argues that how women participate in the peace processes matters greatly for women’s political empowerment in the years that follow. The argument challenges oversimplified assumptions in recent research that the presence of women in peace processes is sufficient for empowerment; instead, who women are and the different roles they play in peace processes shape women’s pathways to power. Using a novel dataset on Women in Peace and Empowerment (WPE) and four case studies (the Philippines, Nepal, Liberia, and El Salvador), including 18 original interviews with participants of peace processes and members of post-conflict governments, this dissertation assesses the relationship between women’s peace process participation and political empowerment after conflict. Findings reveal that when local women participate in both formal and informal peace processes, they experience the greatest political empowerment after conflict ends. The findings also highlight the importance of local women’s influence on the text of the peace agreements for women’s empowerment in the years following the peace process. The results illustrate some of the long-term consequences of gender-inclusive peace processes and underscore the need to pay attention not just to whether women are present, but how they contribute to peace processes. This dissertation contributes a new theoretical explanation for women’s political empowerment after conflict, a novel typology of women’s roles in formal peace processes, and novel empirical insights from difficult-to-access peace participants and policymakers on the connections between formal and informal peace processes.