Leveraging friendshoring in response to sanctions: Essential insights for global managers

Anton Klarin and Sergey Sosnovskikh

Business Horizons, 2025, vol. 68, issue 5, 673-685

Abstract: As the world has become increasingly hostile and politicized, sanctions have become an often-used tool for enforcing global rules. Nevertheless, organizations engaged in international trade have found ways to circumvent imposed sanctions and to deliver goods and services to the sanctioned markets through a variety of means, including offshoring, nearshoring, and, most importantly, friendshoring. There has been a notable increase in these shoring phenomena, especially in the context of global disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States and China trade conflicts, and sanctions related to the Russia–Ukraine War. This study offers a rich account of how organizations overcome economic sanctions that lead to restrictions in trade among trading partners. After holding in-depth interviews with representatives from 44 organizations involved in trade in nine imposing, intermediary, and targeted countries, we synthesized six main friendshoring strategies often used in instances where sanctions are imposed. We end by offering prescriptive guidance for managers whose companies face difficult shoring decisions because of sanctions.

Keywords: Sanctions effectiveness; Sanctions evasion; Sanctions avoidance; Friendshoring; Offshoring; Russia-Ukraine War (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681324001435
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:68:y:2025:i:5:p:673-685

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2024.10.002

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().