(Honors Thesis under the direction of Dr. Navin Bapat)

Abstract: This thesis examines how colonial legacy influences contemporary foreign policy alignment and, through it, vulnerability to U.S. economic sanctions. Using a personally developed country-year panel spanning 1980–2005, I argue that the institutional inheritance of extractive colonialism — characterized by concentrated resource extraction, weak domestic sovereignty, and dependent economic integration (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001) — systematically orients postcolonial states toward Russia (as proxied by UN General Assembly voting), and that this alignment in turn increases their likelihood of U.S. sanction targeting. I employ OLS and logit regression models with year fixed effects, controlling for GDP per capita and regime type, as well as additional WDI indicators including trade openness, natural resource rents, and FDI inflows in the robustness checks. I find that extractive colonies align with Russia at rates approximately 9.4 percentage points higher than never-colonized states, and that this gap is most pronounced during the Cold War period (18.9 percentage points), drastically attenuating after 1991 as bloc discipline dissolved and never-colonized states converged upward. The sanctions analysis yields mixed results: settler colonies show robust and unexpected positive associations with U.S. targeting (concentrated among a small number of historically sanctioned cases), while the extractive colony effect is negative, operates indirectly through alignment, and is strictly bounded by the Cold War period. These findings suggest that colonial institutional legacy affects U.S. sanction exposure primarily through the foreign policy orientations it produces rather than through direct targeting, and that this mechanism is bounded by an era of great power competition. This thesis contributes to the intersecting literatures on postcolonial political economy, great power alignment, and the political economy of sanctions by foregrounding colonial legacy as an undertheorized antecedent to both foreign policy orientation and coercive statecraft.“