Geopolitical conflicts, sanctions and international knowledge flows: EU-Russia collaboration during the Ukraine crisis

This article studies the development of scientific co-publications between EU countries and Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. We investigate if economic sanctions and counter-sanctions imposed during the crisis affected EU-Russia knowledge flows even before all science collaborations between the EU countries and Russia were eventually suspended as part of the EU sanctions in 2022. Our econometric analysis uses a gravity model framework and a comprehensive dataset covering more than 540 million scientific publications and 8.6 million international co-publications for 35 countries (EU, BRICS, Belarus and Ukraine) during 1995-2018. Findings indicate that the imposition of EU sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions from 2014 onwards had a significantly negative effect on EU-Russia co-publication intensities. As a lower bound estimate, we find that sanctions reduced the EU-Russia scientific co-publication intensity by 15% at the aggregate level. Effects are higher in specific scientific fields. We uncover transmission channels of this effect, for example, related to dual-use technologies and growing resentments, and assess the robustness of our estimates. Time-dynamic regressions show that the sanctions effect on scientific collaboration increases over time. This underlines the susceptibility of global knowledge flows to geopolitical conflicts.