İkincil yaptırımlar ve bu yaptırımların Avrupa Birliği üzerindeki etkileri: İran vakası

Sanctions are widely used as a response to foreign crises.The US is one of the in- ternational actors that has been imposing sanctions for a long time, but it became a particularly prominent foreign policy tool under Obama and Trump's administra- tions. Especially secondary sanctions, the sanction type affects the third party, which is not subject to the official sanction policy. This work tries to shed light on how the EU's business and economy has been af- fected by the US sanctions imposed on Iran primarily, and the cases of secondary sanctions under other sanctions policies would be used as supplementary material. EU is not a direct party in those sanction programs and is willing to keep business ties with these countries. However, despite the EU's encouragement, EU-based companies willingly refused any economic actions towards the sanctioned coun- tries, fearing that the US would impose secondary sanctions. This behavior has been explained through the new concept self-sanctioning. Moreover, the EU has been trying to overcome this issue by suggesting several mechanisms to provide a stable ground for the economic ties with sanctioned countries. This is an issue that has economic repercussions and sits within the wider context of not only state to state but state to business relations. From this wider context, this thesis will focus on this primary research question: How did the US's sanctions, within the scope of the Islamic Republic of Iranian sanctions policy, affected the economic environ- ment of the European Union under Obama and Trump's administration?