  Smart sanctions are an increasingly popular tool in foreign policy. Countries
and international institutions worldwide issue such lists to sanction targeted
entities through financial asset freezing, embargoes, and travel restrictions.
The relationships between the issuer and the targeted entities in such lists
reflect what kind of entities the issuer intends to be against. Thus, analyzing
the similarities of sets of targeted entities created by several issuers might
pave the way toward understanding the foreign political power structure that
influences institutions to take similar actions. In the current paper, by
analyzing the smart sanctions lists issued by major countries and international
institutions worldwide (a total of 73 countries, 12 international
organizations, and 1,700 lists), we identify the hierarchical structure of
influence among these institutions that encourages them to take such actions.
The Helmholtz--Hodge decomposition is a method that decomposes network flow
into a hierarchical gradient component and a loop component and is especially
suited for this task. Hence, by performing a Helmholtz--Hodge decomposition of
the influence network of these institutions, as constructed from the smart
sanctions lists they have issued, we show that meaningful insights about the
hierarchical influence structure behind smart sanctions can be obtained.
