Abstract

“Economic sanctions are punishment for bad behaviour and, like a parent punishing a child, they are usually imposed by a bigger more powerful country and they are intended to coerce the child in to stopping their bad behaviour. The motivations to using economic sanctions are very broad, so in this paper we first discuss the six arguably humanitarian motivations: 1. ending international armed conflict, 2. shortening civil wars, 3. improving human rights, 4. stopping state-sponsored terrorism, 5. preventing the development or proliferation of WMD, and 6. promoting regime change. We say they are only “arguably humanitarian” as we subsequently suggest alternative non-humanitarian motivations for these six cases. Then we perform an empirical analysis to find that sanctions are generally ineffective and often make matters worse except potentially in the case of civil war sanctions. A literature review reveals some conflicting evidence in this regard, but the general consensus remains that sanctions are ineffective. To see how exactly things can get worse, we then analyse sanctions on Iran and see how various flaws in sanction design led to a high humanitarian cost. We conclude that sanctions continue to be used despite their questionable humanitarian value because senders act cynically, that is to say they are motivated by domestic approval ratings and maintaining the balance of power rather than any humanitarian concern. Smart sanctions, the now popular thinking in the UN being that these are just as effective but without the high humanitarian cost, are briefly examined. We found that there is not enough evidence to conclusively remark on their effectiveness and suggest that there may yet be ways that sanctions can become smarter.”

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