Sanctions And Embargoes Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The terms sanctions and embargo describe two particular kinds of economic penalties applied from one country (or a group of countries) on another one with a double purpose: to punish the latter by depriving it of essential goods and to force it to conform to the will of the former. Although they represent two different forms of economic coercion, these concepts are currently considered almost synonymous.

Sanctions can be applied for a variety of reasons, including altering the target’s behavior, removing leadership or bringing about regime change, and sending “messages” to other international actors. Sanctions can be imposed to avoid war or to signal the sender’s intention to escalate to more forceful forms of influence. Domestically, sanctions can be aimed to appease a constituency that demands some course of action but does not fully support war. In this case, sanctions constitute an expressive activity, a release of internal tension directed primarily at a domestic or international audience without other ends. Finally, the use of specific sanctions does not imply that the sender wants to achieve only one objective. Various purposes are usually being met. During the oil embargo in 1973, for example, the main sender, Saudi Arabia, had three goals: the Israeli retreat from the Palestinian territories, to relaunch Saudi leadership in the Arab world, and to solidify the domestic consensus for the monarchy in the country.

The use of sanctions as a tool of influence has a longstanding tradition. The continental blockade of the Napoleonic wars and the cotton embargo during the American Civil War (1861–1865) are just two of the most notable examples in which economic sanctions were used to achieve political gains. However, it was only after the First World War (1914–1918) that economic sanctions became a major tool of influence in a policy maker’s hands. Both in the founding treaties of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN), economic sanctions have been identified as key instruments in maintaining peace and order. Article 16 of the League of Nations established the automatic and total imposition of economic sanctions against any country committing an act of war against another state.

Similarly, the UN Security Council can impose mandatory sanctions under Articles 39 and 41 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Article 39 states that the Security Council “shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken . . . to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Article 41 authorizes the Security Council to call on members to apply nonviolent sanctions against offenders. The United States is also a major employer of economic sanctions. During the twentieth century, the United States imposed economic sanctions more than 110 times. In 1998 alone, the United States imposed sanctions on twenty-six target countries.

Although the application of economic sanctions is growing (from 1991 to 1994 the UN Security Council imposed mandatory sanctions eight times, compared to only twice between 1945 and 1990), sanctions have never fully satisfied statesmen and policy analysts in their effectiveness. The reasons for this are manifold. First, sanctions seem unable to achieve their declared targets. In a study made by Gary Hufbauer and colleagues (1990), sanctions appeared to be successful in only

34 percent of the cases where employed. Second, sanctions are slow in achieving their goals. Time affords the target the opportunity to adjust, to find new suppliers, and to mobilize public opinion, with the effect of jeopardizing sanctions’ effectiveness. Third, sanctions are sometimes more costly for the sender than for the target, especially when the sender must compensate domestic companies and neighboring countries for their lost revenues caused by the disruption of their trading routes with the target. Finally, in many cases sanctions do not work on authoritarian regimes. while the civilian population suffered terrible hardship due to the sanctions. According to UN agencies, the destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure during the Gulf War (1990–1991), and the inability of Iraq and the UN Security Council to agree on a humanitarian exception to the sanctions, caused the death of more than five hundred thousand children under the age of five.

To contain the devastating humanitarian impact on the target population, scholars and policy makers have tried in recent years to develop new forms of sanctions customized to maximize the target regime’s costs of noncompliance while minimizing the target population’s suffering. Known as smart sanctions, they do not target the country as a whole. Rather, they identify and target only those groups of individuals that really detain decisional power in the target country. Examples include freezing the assets of selected people, imposing limited embargos on certain goods (such as oil, weapons, or diamonds), and restricting the travel opportunities for individuals and Sanctions may actually produce consequences directly opposite to those intended by the sender. In the case of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, sanctions strengthened his regime, refusing visas. However, because smart sanctions by themselves may not always succeed in inducing early compliance of the target, usually they are integrated with other tools of influence.

In summary, it is difficult to give a definitive evaluation on the effectiveness of sanctions. If sanctions have proved to be unsuccessful in many cases in which they were employed in the past, this does not diminish the fact that they may be more useful in the future. First, sanctions’ efficiency should be measured based on the possible solutions available to the policy maker in a given situation. It would be misleading to talk about costs and benefits in using economic coercion, if no other solution is available. Second, sanctions have proved to be successful when multilateral and proportional to the goal to be achieved. If these conditions are not met, the employment of sanctions could weaken their effectiveness and undermine the sender’s credibility.

Bibliography:

Baldwin, David A. Economic Statecraft. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Cortright, David, and George A. Lopez. Smart Sanctions: Targeting Economic Statecraft. Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Drezner, Daniel W. The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Galtung, Johan. “On the Effects of International Economic Sanctions: With Examples from the Case of Rhodesia.” World Politics 19 (April 1967): 378–416.
Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott. Economic Sanctions Reconsidered. Washington D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990.
Lindsay, James L. “Trade Sanctions as Policy Instruments: A Re-examination.” International Studies Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1986): 153–173.
Martin, Lisa L. Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

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