National Academies Press: OpenBook

International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War (2000)

Chapter: Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy

« Previous: Defining Moment: The Threat and Use of Force in American Foreign Policy Since 1989
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

4
Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy

Bruce W.Jentleson

The sanctions literature is among the most contentious and inconclusive in international relations. Survey the studies of major sanctions cases—from pre-Cold War ones like the 1935–1936 League of Nations sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy, to Cold War-era ones like the U.S. sanctions against Cuba, the 1960s–1970s United Nations (UN) sanctions against Rhodesia, the 1981–1983 Siberian gas pipeline and the 1980s antiapartheid sanctions, and post-Cold War cases like Iraq, Serbia, Haiti, Libya, and Iran—and one finds some studies that claim success while others of the very same cases conclude that the sanctions were failures.

The basic theoretical debate is often cast as traditionalists versus revisionists. Traditionalists see little efficacy in sanctions. “It would be difficult to find any proposition in the international relations literature more widely accepted,” as David Baldwin puts it in his critique of the traditionalists, “than those belittling the utility of economic techniques of statecraft.” Among the works Baldwin cites are studies by Henry Bienen and Robert Gilpin, who accept “the nearly unanimous conclusion of scholars that sanctions seldom achieve their purposes and more likely have severe counterproductive consequences”; Charles Kindleberger, that “most sanctions are not effective”; Klaus Knorr, on their “uncertain effectiveness and decidedly low utility when used for purposes of coercing other states”; Margaret Doxey, that “in none of the cases analyzed in this study have economic sanctions succeeded in producing the desired political result”; Johan Galtung, that “the probable effectiveness of economic sanctions is, generally, negative”; and Donald Losman, that the cases he studied “failed to accomplish their political ends, and it seems unlikely that economic

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

measures alone will fare better in the future.” Among more recent authors, Robert Pape takes this view quite strongly, titling his article “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work.”1

In his Economic Statecraft, often cited as the leading revisionist work, Baldwin questions whether sanctions are held to an “analytical ‘double standard’…prone to accentuate the negative and downplay the positive aspects of such measures.”2 Among other studies that are or lean toward revisionism are those by M.S.Daoudi and M.S.Dajani, concluding that sanctions “are useful and effective political weapons in international politics”; Barry Carter, that “there is persuasive historical evidence that sanctions can sometimes be an effective tool for achieving foreign policy objectives”; Lisa Martin, that “sanctions can be a useful foreign policy tool”; Jonathan Kirshner, that “one fundamental conclusion is clear…[monetary sanctions] have demonstrated considerable power”; and Elizabeth Rogers, that “economic sanctions are more effective than most analysts suggest.”3

Perhaps the best example of the inconclusiveness over sanctions is the study Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (by Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott; hereafter referred to as the HSE study), which is cited by both traditionalists and revisionists as supporting their arguments.4 Revisionists hail the 34 percent success rate in the HSE study as higher than traditionalists claimed, while traditionalists raise methodological issues about the validity of the 34 percent rate and question, even if it is valid, just how impressive it is.

The uncertainties of the sanctions efficacy debate have become even more problematic in the post-Cold War era because of the frequency with which sanctions are used, as a veritable weapon of choice, in many different cases by many different actors. Some cases have involved the United States acting unilaterally; others have involved multilateral action by the UN and regional organizations such as the Organization of American States and the Organization for African Unity; still others have involved other international actors, as with Greece against Macedonia and Russia against various ex-Soviet states. All told, sanctions have been used in pursuit of a broad range of objectives related to international conflict prevention, conflict management, and conflict resolution. Yet as one recent study put it, “contemporary scholarship and policy analysis [lag] behind the current plethora of sanctions episodes…[and] scholars and policy makers readily acknowledge that judgments about current sanctions cases are made on the basis of ill-defined generalizations.”5 Of course, there cannot be a single theory or strategy, foolproof and universal. But we can do better in developing middle-range and conditional generalizations that balance the desirability of parsimony of explanation with the complexity of the range of factors that affect the policy utility of sanctions.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

This study seeks to move toward this goal and to do so in a manner that has the theoretical significance as well as the policy relevance needed to help “bridge the gap.”6 It begins with a discussion of the main conceptual and methodological issues that complicate empirical research and theory development on sanctions. The next section reviews the theoretical debate and Cold War-era record through an analytical framework of sanctions as a coercive bargaining strategy, encompassing both the political economy of the relationships among the major actors and the design of the strategy by which sanctions are imposed.

The third section analyzes the use of sanctions thus far in the post-Cold War era in the context of the broader systemic changes—strategic, economic, political—that mark our transitional period. Three major empirical patterns are identified: the increased frequency with which sanctions are being used, the increased economic impact they are having, and their mixed record of policy success and failure. The central dynamic is what I term the “vulnerability-viability” paradox of shifts in the post-Cold War political economy both conducive and counter to sanctions’ efficacy, heightening target state vulnerability on the one hand but making the political viability of sanctions more problematic on the other. The fourth section then considers the challenges this analysis poses for both theory and policy in an effort to move toward greater “sanctions realism” that recognizes both the scope and the limits, the possibilities as well as the requisites, for sanctions to be an effective strategy for international conflict prevention, management, and resolution.

CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN SANCTIONS RESEARCH

As noted, one of the striking aspects of the literature on sanctions is the extent to which there is debate even over what constitutes success and failure, let alone the policy strategies for achieving success and the theories for explaining when and why success is most likely to be achieved. The HSE study sought to resolve these analytical differences with an ordinal scale of “success score” rankings. In the HSE study the two measures were “the extent to which the policy objective sought by the sender state was in fact achieved” and “the contribution made by the sanctions (as opposed to other factors, such as military action).” Each was coded on a scale from 1 to 4: for the policy result, running from failed (1) to successful (4); for the sanctions contribution, from zero or negative contribution (1) to significant contribution (4). The two codings were multiplied and scores of 9 and above were deemed successes and 8 or below failures.7 However, far from resolving the methodological problems, the HSE meth-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

odology itself has been the subject of extensive debate, with serious questions raised about its own reliability and validity.8

All of this is indicative of a number of inherently difficult conceptual and methodological issues that complicate research on economic sanctions: (a) the lack of a consensual definition of the basic term of investigation, “economic sanctions”; (b) the need to differentiate among the different types of objectives that sanctions can have; (c) selection bias problems in identifying sets of cases for analysis; (d) the problem of establishing reliable and valid criteria for measuring policy outcomes as a dependent variable; (e) the independent variable problem of attributing causality for whatever impact is measured to sanctions vis-à-vis other aspects of the overall foreign policy strategy; and (f) setting a standard for what constitutes an acceptable rate of success.

Establishing a Working Definition of Economic Sanctions

One of the problems for research on economic sanctions is that there is no common accepted definition in the literature. Some definitions are broad and encompassing; some are narrow; some, as Kim Richard Nossal laments, are “idiosyncratic, often sloppy.”9 The most useful working definition in my view is of sanctions as the actual or threatened denial of economic relations by one or more states (sender[s]) intended to influence the behavior of another state (target) on noneconomic issues or to limit its military capabilities. The key elements this definition seeks to convey are that (a) this is a coercive act, as distinct from inducements and other more positive influence efforts; (b) that the instrument is economic, most often trade relations but also monetary relations, investments, credits, foreign aid, and foreign assets; and (c) that the objective is impact on noneconomic policy, such as foreign policy behavior or domestic politics, but excluding trade disputes and other economic bargaining objectives.

As such this is a narrower definition than some, such as Baldwin’s “economic statecraft,” which holds to element b but by including positive inducements among the instruments and trade and other economic bargaining cases among the objectives not to elements a or c.10 On the other hand, it is broader in its scope of objectives than those, such as Pape’s, that principally focus on whether sanctions can achieve the same goals as military force.11

Objectives of Sanctions

Here, too, as with the definition of sanctions, and even within the noneconomic parameter of point c above, there is huge variation in the literature in the terms of conceptualization of the objectives of sanctions.12

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

TABLE 4.1 Typology of Sanctions’ Objectives

 

Limited

Extensive

Containment

Military capabilities

Economic warfare

Antiaggression

Policies (e.g., terrorism, proliferation)

Wars, invasions

Domestic Political Influence

Democratization, human rights

Regime change

Consistent with the purposes of this paper, my focus is on those objectives that pertain most directly to conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and conflict management—on “‘what works’…for preventing, mitigating, resolving, or nonviolently managing conflicts of concern to the international community.”13

Table 4.1 sketches a typology based on the purpose and scope of sanctions’ objectives. The principal distinctions are among three different purposes: containment, limiting the target state’s military and other relevant capabilities so as to constrain its capacity for causing conflicts; anti-aggression, deterring or compelling the target state to refrain from or cease military or other aggressive actions; and domestic political influence, coercing change in the target state’s domestic politics or policies. The sub-distinctions in each of these between limited and extensive objectives are consistent with the more general literature about the need for proportionality between means and ends.14 Containing a target’s military capabilities is a more limited objective than broader economic warfare; coercing change in aggressive policies such as terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is more limited than deterring it from launching or compelling it to end a war or invasion; pressuring for democratization or protecting human rights is more limited than forcing a change in the governing regime.

Case Selection

The question of what constitutes a sanctions case is important for both comparative case analyses and aggregate data studies. Even within the definitional parameters set above, there are three other methodological issues about how and what to count. One is the problem of how substantial the action must be to constitute a case. We know to include “big” cases like Iraq, Cuba, Haiti, and Serbia. But what about instances that involve more limited measures? For example, in May 1998 Turkey suspended a $145 million arms purchase with France because of a resolu-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

tion passed by the French National Assembly recognizing the Armenian “genocide” of 1915. Was this a sufficient action to be considered a sanctions case? There is no definitive answer.

Second is the question of what to do about cases in which sanctions were invoked but did not have to be imposed because the threat sufficed for the desired coercive effect. The problem here is akin to that for general studies of deterrence, when the standing deterrence posture may have impact even if no explicit threats are made. While such cases are inherently harder to identify empirically, their exclusion can bias the sample from which conclusions about efficacy are drawn.15

Third is the question of how to count cases like the U.S. sanctions against Cuba that have gone on for many years. Is this a single case? Should it be analytically split over time? These questions are important as we need to know the time frame in order to know at what point(s) to take the measures of success or failure.

Dependent Variable Measurement: Assessing Policy Outcomes

Consistent with the HSE approach we can cast the dependent variable as a measurement of the extent to which the sender achieves its objectives at an acceptable cost. The operationalization of such terms, though, in a methodologically sound manner is more complicated than their 1 to 4 ordinal scale depicts. Three factors are key—differentiation, net assessment, and relativity—each of which has its own problems to be overcome.

Differentiation: The measure of success and failure needs to be differentiated in two respects. One is that multiple objectives often are pursued, with some achieved to a greater degree than others. The objectives in Table 4.1 are not at all mutually exclusive; many sanctions cases involve more than one of these types of objectives. Objectives thus need relative weights on a case-specific basis. And this must be done despite the frequent discrepancy, and at times even inverse relationship, between the emphasis on an objective in public rhetoric and its genuine policy importance. The other is the need for the measure to be cast in nondichotomous terms even as applied to success/failure on a particular objective. It is hard enough to find cases of total victory in war, let alone with a less directly coercive policy instrument like economic sanctions. We thus need to have measures that pick up on degrees of success/failure and that work with ranges and not strict yes/no conceptions of outcomes.

A caveat, though, is that too minimalist criteria must be avoided. While our analytical measures must be gauged to register whether something is achieved even when everything is not, too low a bar should not be set. It is one thing to acknowledge degrees of success, but some

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

midpoint needs to be defined, a threshold established, so that a claim of some degree of success is not necessarily sufficient for a positive bottom line.

Net assessment: Net assessments take into account costs incurred as well as gains made. It would be of sufficient concern if the only consequence of ineffective sanctions were nonpositive—that is, that they simply did not achieve the objectives for which they were intended. However, they also can be not just nonpositive but also net negative in terms of the costs they end up carrying in one or more of four respects: backfiring and having a politically integrative effect strengthening the will of an embattled people to resist; misfiring and inflicting a humanitarian crisis on the civilian populace, making the “civilian pain” much greater than any “political gain”;16cross-firing, straining relations with key allies; and shooting in the foot with high self-inflicted costs.

The argument that costs incurred can actually have a beneficial effect as a show of resolve is often made.17 It is said to be part of U.S. leadership responsibilities to be willing to bear costs to take actions that, even if others do not join in, convey a message of resolve. Or in the Wilsonian version of the argument, it is holding high the mantle of democratic values. Credibility, though, is not just about resolve; it also is about judgment. It therefore cannot be too readily assumed that incurring costs will be a credibility-enhancing demonstration of fortitude. Incurring costs can deter, but it does not necessarily do so. It also may convey weakness, damage prestige, and erode credibility.

Relativity: The assessment must be relative to other available policy options. What sanctions did or did not achieve and at what cost must be compared to the pros and cons of available alternative policy strategies. As Baldwin rightly stresses, “policy making involves making decisions, and decision making involves choosing among alternative courses of action. The advantages and disadvantages of various policy options acquire significance primarily by comparison with the options.”18 This also is a point to which policy makers give great emphasis. If not sanctions, then what? Business as usual has a derogatory ring to it, both strategically and within domestic politics. The caution here is that sanctions not become a default option, resorted to based more on the negatives of other options than any systematic or convincing analysis of the probable efficacy of sanctions themselves. If an American president’s choice genuinely is between sanctions and a policy response with a high likelihood of war, the relative merits of the sanctions option are obvious. But while the sanctions option often gets justified in this way, the reality is often more complicated. As Alexander George argues with respect to coercive diplomacy, the relative attractiveness of a particular policy option compared to others must not be confused with an assessment of its

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

own feasibility and utility.19 Thus, the question regarding relativity to other policy options should be asked but the answer not assumed a priori.

In addition to the methodological complexity that these factors add up to, there are rigorous data requirements if analytical reliability and validity are to be achieved. This is another of the methodological problems with the HSE study. The empirical evidence on which the HSE authors base their case codings is exceedingly limited, quite unsystematic, often very selective, and mostly from secondary sources.

Independent Variable: Attributing Causality

Once we have a measure of impact, the next question is the extent to which sanctions get credit for the success or blame for the lack thereof relative to other components of the sender state’s overall strategy. Here too the HSE construct (“the contribution made by sanctions”) has significant empirical and analytical deficiencies that leave two main problems that can undermine the validity of the causal analysis.

One is a false positive reading—that is, cases in which success is achieved but mistakenly attributed to sanctions rather than one of the other policies involved in the situation. This is one of the main bases for Pape’s critique of the HSE study—that the principal or even exclusive credit for many of the HSE study’s successes should go to the use of military force, covert action, and other such policies rather than to sanctions. While some of Pape’s criticisms are stronger than others, the problem remains that many outcomes are overdetermined in their causality, making it hard to reliably establish where the credit lies. Moreover, part of the problem here as well is the data quality one, with much more systematic data gathering and analysis required if we are to have the empirical base needed to determine how and why key policy decisions were made.

The bigger problem is with false negatives. Here there are two sub-types: (1) cases of policy failure in which sanctions did their job, but other policies that were part of the overall strategy did not, and (2) cases in which sanctions did fail but could have worked had mistakes of strategy and implementation not been made in the ways in which they were used. Sensitivity to reaching falsely negative conclusions and keeping analytically open to the possibility that sanctions may have worked had they been done right, whether in themselves or as they fit into an overall foreign policy strategy, is a no less crucial consideration for drawing appropriate policy lessons from certain failure cases than is caution about reaching premature analytical closure around a false positive. I come back to this point later with regard to some key post-Cold War cases.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

This does get into the realm of counterfactual analysis, of trying to make claims and offer explanations about what could have happened. While there is no strict singular method for doing counterfactual analysis, as Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin state, it must be done substantively and according to explicit criteria if we are to be able “to distinguish plausible from implausible, insightful from vacuous arguments.”20 These are methodological challenges worth tackling, both with regard to sanctions and other areas of foreign policy strategy, because important insights and policy lessons can be gained.21

Reasonable Expectations for the Success Rate of Sanctions

Even once all these conceptual and methodological problems are worked out and one has confidence in the success rate that is measured, the question is: Measured against what? What are “reasonable expectations” for the percentage of successes needed for sanctions to be considered an effective strategy?22 In baseball a batter who hits .300—that is, three successes out of 10 tries—is considered to have had an excellent year. But in football a quarterback needs a passing completion rate of more than 50 percent to be considered as having had even a good season. In gymnastics a 9 out of 10 is actually a little low.

Even taking the HSE study’s 34 percent success rate on its face, there are differing views of whether it meets expectations. Elizabeth Rogers sees it as “respectable” compared to other coercive foreign policy strategies, such as military intervention and covert action.23 Others, though, see a one in three success rate for a strategy that carries such significant costs as much less acceptable.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK: SANCTIONS AS A COERCIVE BARGAINING STRATEGY

The working definition given earlier conveys a conceptualization of economic sanctions as a coercive bargaining strategy. There are strong similarities with Alexander George’s concept of coercive diplomacy, as well as with Thomas Schelling’s work on political-military bargaining.24 All these strategies have coercive components but are used in ways and kept at levels that entail inducing rather than fully and forcefully imposing compliance.

For sanctions this means both having economic impact and conveying political credibility. Sanctions need to hurt. The target state needs to feel their economic impact if and when imposed or, if still at the stage of a threat, be convinced that it will. The HSE study showed a differential in the average level of economic impact between success (2.4 percent of

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

TABLE 4.2 Sanctions as Coercive Bargaining: An Analytical Framework

Main Factors

Dimensions

Political economy of sanctions

Alternative trade partner cooperation

Target state defense

Sender state constraints

Design of sanctions’ strategy

Objectives

Targeting

Enforcement

Broader policy context

gross domestic product [GDP]) and failures (1.0 percent). In addition, T. Clifton Morgan and Valerie Schwebach subjected the HSE data to more rigorous analysis and found their own relationship between costs imposed and effectiveness.25 This is not to say that the efficacy of sanctions neatly correlates to economic impact. Kirshner’s comparison of the 1960– 1962 U.S. sanctions against the Dominican Republic and the 1987–1989 sanctions against Panama is an example of greater political influence in the case with lesser, albeit still significant, economic impact.26 It stands to reason, though, that if a target state has to take into account significant economic impact, whether felt or anticipated, this will affect its political decisions. In addition, beyond the immediate material impact of sanctions, political credibility comes into play as a matter of conveying a strong sense of the sender state’s will and capacity to do what is necessary to gain compliance. It must be clear that the sender state will stay the course of the sanctions as imposed and ratchet them up to an increased level if need be, as well as take other coercive actions as necessary. Nor is it enough for the sender to claim credibility; the key is the target state’s perceptions.

Two main sets of factors are key to the efficacy of sanctions as a coercive bargaining strategy: the political economy of the relationships among the key actors and the design of the strategy by which sanctions are imposed (Table 4.2). Each is discussed along with illustrative and substantiating Cold War-era examples.

The Political Economy of Sanctions

Here there are three dimensions: (1) the alternative trade partner dilemma and the likelihood of multilateral cooperation, (2) the target state’s “sanctions defense” capacity, and (3) the domestic constraints on the sender state.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
The Alternative Trade Partner Dilemma

Historically, the most frequent cause of the failure of sanctions has been other states acting as alternative trade partners for the target state. “A country menaced with an interruption of trade with a given country,” as Albert O.Hirschmann stated as the general proposition in his classic 1945 work, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, “has the alternative of diverting trade to a third country: by so doing it evades more or less completely the damaging consequences of the stoppage of trade with one particular country. The stoppage or the threat of it would thus lose all its force.”27

There are two main reasons why the need for multilateral cooperation from prospective alternative trade partners is so important. First, even if a premium must be paid or some efficiency is lost, the ability to trade with an alternative partner substantially reduces the economic impact that sanctions can have. This has been true even in cases of extreme economic dependence, as in the Cold War-era Soviet-Yugoslavia and U.S.-Cuba cases.28 Second, alternative trade partners also can have a political effect that plays into the political credibility and influence conversion problem. If, as in the Yugoslavian and Cuban cases, the alternative trade is provided by states that are adversaries of the sender, the target can feel it has the safe haven of a protector. From this more secure position there is less pressure to be compelled into submission or even to be deterred from future provocations. And if the alternative trade comes from the sender state’s own allies, the threat to sustain the sanctions or escalate the level of confrontation loses much of its credibility. The message of resolve is much less credible if other states, especially allies, do not show solidarity.29

Multilateral cooperation on sanctions can be achieved in three ways: shared interests, sender state leverage, and institutionalized cooperation. “Identity of interests,” as the old adage from Thucydides has it, “is the surest of bonds, whether between states or individuals.”30 The surest of bonds, perhaps, but not the most common, not even among Cold War allies, as was evident in the 1981–1983 Siberian gas pipeline case with the major intraalliance differences and disputes stemming from divergences between the United States and key Western European allies over both the economic interests at stake and divergent foreign policy strategies for relations with the Soviet Union.31

In this and other cases sender states resorted to imposition of secondary sanctions, claims of extraterritoriality, and other modes of leverage seeking to coerce cooperation. An interesting contrast in this regard is between the 1962–1963 “Friendship” oil pipeline case, when the United States was able to coerce its European allies to reduce their oil trade with

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

the Soviet Union, and the 1981–1983 Siberian gas pipeline case, in which comparable cooperation could not be coerced. In the 1960s case U.S. leverage was sufficient in both its political and economic sources to get Italy to cut back on its imports of Soviet oil and Germany to block its exports of wide-diameter pipe.32 However, in the early 1980s, Reagan administration efforts to coerce European compliance through the secondary sanctions of the extraterritorial application of U.S. law set off bitter charges and countercharges, and the Reagan administration eventually had to accede, lifting the secondary sanctions with but a few face-saving concessions by the allies.33

The third main strategy is through multilateral institutions. One of the problems with East-West energy trade issues like the Soviet pipelines was that they largely fell outside the framework of the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), which was the semiformal NATO-like organization established in 1949 to coordinate Western alliance policy on dual-use exports and other militarily relevant and strategically significant trade. While conflicts did occur within COCOM, going back even to the 1950s, for the most part the norms, procedures, and structures established through COCOM provided the basis for managing these differences and maintaining prevailing Western multilateral cooperation, including in some instances by the United States making compromises with an eye to sustaining COCOM.34

The United Nations played a very limited role in sanctions prior to the post-Cold War era. It is vested by its charter with sanctions authority: if the UN Security Council determines under Article 39 the “existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression,” under Article 41 it can authorize “complete or partial interruption of economic relations” and under Article 42 it can enforce these through “such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary.” But the UN only used this authority twice during the Cold War era—in 1966 for comprehensive sanctions against Rhodesia following the white minority regime’s unilateral declaration of independence and in 1979 for an arms embargo against South Africa. While in both cases the UN’s role was an important one, this did not make for much of a frequency rate. One factor constraining UN action was the Security Council’s veto threat from one or the other superpower. Another was the disinclination to intervene even through sanctions on human rights and other intrastate issues that was rooted in the “sovereignty as sacrosanct” strict constructionism that was a legacy of postcolonialism.35

The one other institution that had some success in facilitating cooperation on sanctions was the European Community in the Falklands War case. Lisa Martin shows how Britain worked through the EC to gain cooperation with its sanctions. This was more the exception, however, than the

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

rule.36 The issue was the extreme one of a war, not just a foreign policy dispute or human rights violation. And the EC, for all its problems and rivalries, generally was well ahead of other regional organizations in its capacity for collective action.

Target State Characteristics and Sanctions Defense Capacity

One key aspect of a target state’s sanctions defense capacity is the extent to which it can mobilize its own economy for domestic substitution. This can reduce the immediate disruptive effects as well as the ongoing economic impact. In some cases sanctions have even served as the functional equivalent of high tariffs, “protecting” domestic industry from foreign competition. Thus in Rhodesia, while sanctions ultimately did help bring down the white minority regime, the domestic substitution capacity by which it increased domestic manufacturing capacity from 602 products presanctions to 3,837 five years later was one of the reasons it took 14 years and the added pressure of a number of other forces, most particularly the guerrilla war.37

In other cases this economic self-defense may be less economywide and more the bastion of the governing regime and supporting elites through black markets, sanctions busting, and other profiteering. U.S. sanctions against Noriega in Panama, for example, wreaked the most damage “to the Panamanian economy since Henry Morgan, the pirate who sacked Panama City in 1671,” yet Noriega well insulated himself and his cronies.38 The pattern can be seen in post-Cold War cases such as Haiti and Iraq.

The other aspect of target state self-defense against sanctions is the relative political will it can muster to bear whatever costs are imposed and thus block any significant conversion of economic impact to political influence. It is in this regard that the political effects in fact often end up backfiring. Johan Galtung, writing in the early days of the sanctions against Rhodesia, assailed as “naïve theories of economic warfare” those theories that “do not take into account the possibility that value deprivation may initially lead to political integration and only later—perhaps much later, or even never—to political disintegration.”39

It is in this sense that it is argued that nondemocracies are harder to influence through sanctions than are democracies. However, we need to get beyond this categorical distinction as there are cross-cutting patterns in both political regime categories. The key element is not just the formal domestic political structure but the extent to which the political system is apt to react to sanctions in the politically integrative dynamic that Galtung warned about or is open to sanctions having a more undermining effect on regime support. This means getting at the permeability of the regime

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

as indicated by the degree of independent activity of domestic actors that can act as “transmission belts,” carrying the economic impact of the sanctions into the target’s core political structures.40

The likelihood of transmission belt effects depends on two factors. One is the role of key elites (e.g., political, the military, business) and whether they calculate their interests as served by or at risk from sanctions. As an economic assessment this depends on the degree of internationalization of elite economic interests. This may be a general macroeconomic internationalization or it may be more particularistic; the latter is what financial assets freezes and other sanctions targeted at the financial sector in part are intended to get at. However, if target state elites are not substantially engaged in the international economy, be it through trade or investment or finance, they are less likely to have enough to lose to spur them to bring pressure on their government. They may even stand to gain from import substitutions, black markets, or other economic opportunities induced by sanctions. In addition, if the sanctions are seeking to bring about democratic or other political reforms that in themselves are inconsistent with elite interests, elites have an added political calculus for blocking the transmission.

The other key factor is whether there is a reasonably strong internal political opposition and whether it is strengthened or undermined by sanctions. The effect can be strengthening both as a show of international solidarity and through economic disruptions on which the opposition can capitalize; it also, though, may backfire, cutting the opposition off from outside contact and providing nationalist cover for the regime to increase repression.41

One of the main reasons for the limited efficacy of sanctions during the Cold War was that so few states had “activatable” transmission belts. This was true of the Soviet Union and other communist countries but not just communist countries. In Latin America few elites did much transmission of the human rights sanctions. Their interests were with the regime. Moreover, they knew that in the Cold War context there were limits to how much the United States would push and pressure them. So too with other semiauthoritarian, semidemocratic U.S. Third World allies.

South Africa was the Cold War-era case that best demonstrates the transmission belt effect. The sanctions “affected key sectors of the South African economy…thus creating the powerful effect of chilling business confidence.” Moreover, “South African whites, who consider themselves European, were shunned by these countries. The non-economic sanction of banning sports-crazy South Africa from international sporting events had a particularly potent negative effect on the psyche of South African whites.” At this juncture the elites shifted from buttressing the regime

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

against international pressure to transmitting that pressure internally “to abandon apartheid and to opt for a negotiated transition to democracy.”42

Another factor often cited is the sender/target state bilateral relationship. When this relationship is already highly adversarial, target states are more apt to resist sanctions. Daniel Drezner shows how this comes through as calculations of relative gains based on “conflict expectations” in his study of Russian sanctions against other states in the formerly Soviet space.43 HSE and others take this argument further to claim that sanctions generally work better against allies than adversaries. While there is some logic to this it does not generalize to countersanctions and claims of extraterritoriality, which as in the U.S.-European relationship consistently touch a nerve.

Sender State’s Domestic Constraints

The third dimension to the political economy of sanctions gets at the sender state’s motivations. On the one side are any strategic calculations that lead it to see benefits in sanctions even if they are unilateral and even in the face of a well self-defending target. On the other hand are domestic constraints from interest groups and bureaucratic actors that seek to block the enactment of sanctions, impede their imposition, or prompt their lifting.

For much of the Cold War there was a strategic logic for the United States to still impose sanctions unilaterally when multilateral cooperation was not possible. More often than not the case was a strong one for acting even when other states would not because of the responsibilities of global leadership. On the political side there were few domestic constraints, both because of the Cold War consensus and the general lesser importance of trade to the American economy than for Europe or Japan. However, over the course of the Cold War, as the former weakened and the latter grew, the calculus became more ambivalent.

Take, for example, grain trade with the Soviet Union. When in 1963 President Kennedy proposed the first major grain sale ($250 million) to the Soviets, the reaction even in the farmbelt was lukewarm at best. At that time farm income was increasing at a rate of 11.8 percent, and exports constituted only 21 percent of total grain output. There was, though, a strong sentiment, as expressed by 10 farm belt members of the House Agriculture Committee, that “the vast majority of American farmers, like the vast majority of all Americans, are unwilling to sell out a high moral principle, even for solid gold.”44 Yet in 1980 when President Carter imposed the grain embargo against the Soviets in retaliation for their invasion of Afghanistan, it set off a wave of prairie fever that was among the key factors in his overwhelming defeat in the 1980 presidential election.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

Now the domestic political economy was very different: exports accounted for 40 percent of total grain output; exports to the Soviet Union were 15.6 percent of total grain exports; and the agricultural sector no longer was prosperous, indeed was in a deep recession. Ronald Reagan felt this pressure, too, and notwithstanding the rest of his tough anti-Soviet positions (“Why shouldn’t the Western world quarantine the Soviet Union,” one of his 1980 campaign stump speeches went, “until they decide to behave like a civilized nation?”), promised to lift the grain embargo if elected. He not only lifted the embargo but also signed a trade agreement with the Soviets pledging not to impose one ever again—this on the one American export on which the Soviets relied heavily and in the same year that he proclaimed the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

Another example involved Iraq in the period prior to the Gulf War.45 In 1988, following Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons warfare against the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Senate passed an anti-Iraq sanctions bill by a unanimous vote. The Reagan administration actually opposed the bill, both because of the trade benefits and because of the strategic rationale for trading with Iraq, at least as the administration saw the relationship in terms of the enemy of my enemy as my friend. It thus did little to oppose, and even tacitly supported, efforts by groups with trade interests at stake to head off the bill in the House of Representatives. Iraq had become the twelfth-largest overall market for American agricultural exports, and as House Agriculture Committee Chairman E. “Kika” de la Garza (D-Tex.) put it, while “I in no way wish to condone the use of chemical weapons by Iraq…in light of the difficulties our nation’s farmers have faced over the past few years, I am deeply concerned over any possible loss of a major market.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged that the United States “set aside the emotions of the moment” and ponder the economic costs of sanctions. The U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, whose member companies included major oil companies and other Fortune 500 companies, asserted that while “morality is an essential ingredient in foreign policy in a democratic society…morality detached from reality is stupidity.” The sanctions bill died in the House.

Design of Sanctions’ Strategy

When it comes to military strategy, questions of strategy design are asked as a matter of course. They also should be, but often are not, when it comes to sanctions. Here they involve four main components: the definition of objectives, as already initially discussed; targeting strategy; measures for enforcement; and the broader policy context of which sanctions are a part.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Sanctions’ Objectives

The different objectives identified in Table 4.1 play into the political economy of sanctions (Table 4.2) in distinct ways. Military containment objectives have two inherent advantages but also one major disadvantage. The advantages are that target states have fewer self-defense options because of limited ability to domestically substitute for the sophisticated technologies and unique materiel denied and that the strong national security rationale can help limit the domestic constraints in the sender state. The disadvantage is that these sanctions are especially vulnerable to the target state finding even one alternative trade partner that can provide it with the military capability it is seeking, such as equipment and technologies for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand, economic containment poses difficulties along all three political economy dimensions. Its economic warfare requires even broader cooperation from alternative trade partners yet provides a weaker sense of shared interests. Its image of the enemy “trying to choke us” feeds right into target state leaders’ nationalistic appeals. Domestically for the sender state it means taking on a wider range of interest groups yet with a weaker claim to an overriding strategic rationale.

Because the antiaggression and domestic political influence objectives require not only affecting capabilities but also influencing policy behavior, their success requires both having economic impact and converting that impact into political influence. This makes them more reliant on the transmission belts in the target state by which economic denial is converted into policy or political change. Moreover, they have the same difficulties of proportionality as do other limited coercive strategies. This is reflected in the HSE study’s findings of a 50 percent sanctions success rate for “modest policy change” but only a 23 percent success rate for “high policy.”

Targeting Strategy

One of the main points of agreement in the literature is that sanctions that are comprehensive in scope as well as decisive in their imposition are more effective than partial ones ratcheted up incrementally.46 The usual arguments for an incremental approach are that it constitutes a measured method of conflict management and that it is easier to get multilateral cooperation. The critique, though, is that this approach undermines the coercive capacity of sanctions by limiting their immediate economic disruptive impact, by making the political message one of less than firm resolve, by providing time for the target to build up its defensive counter-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

measures (e.g., stockpiling oil or other strategic commodities), and by the onset of “sanctions fatigue.”

The specific and intentional policy choice to target sanctions at certain sectors deemed economically strategic is different from just keeping sanctions partial. Past cases of sectoral targeting show oil sanctions to have been the most successful. The lessons of the 1973 sanctions by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which as the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies put it were a success “at the highest level of politics,” still are with us.47 Conversely, in the Mussolini-League of Nations case, it was the unwillingness of the British and the French to embargo oil that doomed the sanctions. Mussolini himself was quoted as having told Hitler three years later that, if his oil supply had been embargoed, “I would have had to order a withdrawal from Abyssinnia [Ethiopia] in a week.”48

The various sanctions targeted at the financial sector also appear associated with a number of successes. HSE found a 41 percent success rate for financial sanctions, compared to 25 percent for trade sanctions. Three factors explain this greater efficacy: (1) greater target state vulnerability because of the limited domestic substitution capacity for foreign capital; (2) the ability to target financial sanctions, as through freezes of foreign assets, at transmission belts in the regime and at its key supporters; and (3) a tendency for domestic constraints in the sender state to be weak—in fact, financial sanctions often are in the interest of groups seeking to recover assets or debts. Examples include South Africa, where the currency crisis set off by the credit crunch was “the last nail in the coffin that drove [President Frederick] de Klerk to negotiate with the ANC [African National Congress],”49 and the 1979–1981 crisis over the American hostages held in Iran, in which the financial sanction of freezing over $11 billion in Iranian assets was “one of the key elements in their [the hostages’] eventual release.”50

Enforcement

Leaky sanctions not only mitigate economic impact but also undermine political credibility. For if you tell me you are going to hurt me, but I know that for all your tough talk I am able to get around your threats, you won’t be very credible in my eyes the next time you make a threat. Yet enforcement often has been a problem. The UN’s role in the enforcement of sanctions during the Cold War era was more on paper than in practice. It had set up a mechanism called the Collective Measures Committee back in 1951–1952 to address the enforcement problem, but its recommendations were buried under the general paralysis of such type of action by the Cold War.51 In the U.S.-Soviet case there was serious leakage

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

of technology transfer controls, especially of dual-use technologies, reaching the Soviets in the late 1970s to early 1980s.52 This also was a major problem with Iraq in the 1980s, as Saddam Hussein’s regime took advantage of lax Western enforcement to establish a global front company network and other means for acquiring weapons of mass destruction-related technologies, thus both acquiring proscribed capabilities and drawing damaging conclusions about Western credibility.53

Broader Policy Context

HSE used the term “companion policies” to make the point that sanctions rarely if ever are used on their own and thus, aside from all the above sanctions-specific criteria, their effectiveness in part depends on the other components that constitute the broader policy context. Analytically, the false positive and false negative methodological problems often come from not taking this broader policy context into account and attributing credit to or placing blame on sanctions that should go to another aspect of policy.

In policy terms this can cut one of two ways. One relates to questions of credibility and whether the broader policy context leads the target state to perceive sanctions as either a step away from or a step toward the use of military force. The sign-of-weakness perception is risked when sanctions come out of a policy debate that expresses doubts about if not rejection of more coercive measures; the sign-of-resolve perception is more likely when sanctions are arrived at perhaps as a first step and within a broader policy message of other tougher steps likely to follow if there is no compliance.

The other key aspect of the broader policy context is how the stick of sanctions links to whatever carrots are being offered as inducements. Here the problem can either be that the inducements are too much and/or too quick for the stick to have the credibility it needs or that they are insufficient to provide balance to the bargaining strategy.

SANCTIONS IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: PATTERNS AND ANALYSIS

Given the profound changes that have come with the end of the Cold War, how have sanctions been affected? In this section four major patterns are identified: the increased frequency with which sanctions are being used; the substantially greater economic impact that sanctions are having; their mixed policy record of success and failure; and changes in the political economy of sanctions along the lines of what I term the “vulnerability-viability paradox.”

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

TABLE 4.3 Major Post-Cold War Economic Sanctions

Year Imposeda

Target

Principal Sender(s)b

Principal Objectives

1990–1991

Iraq

UN

Military containment, antiaggression

1990

China

U.S.

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1990

El Salvador

U.S.

Antiaggression (civil war), domestic political influence (human rights)

1990

Lithuania

USSR

Domestic political influence (revoke independence)

1990

Suriname

Netherlands

Domestic political influence (regime change)

1990

Zaire

U.S., EU, Belgium

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1991

Former Yugoslavia

UN

Military containment (arms embargo)

1991

Kenya

U.S., Western Europe

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1991, 1993

Haiti

U.S., OAS, UN

Domestic political influence (regime change)

1991

Thailand

U.S.

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Peru

U.S.

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Somalia

UN

Antiaggression (civil war)

1992

Liberia

UN

Antiaggression (civil war)

1992

Malawi

U.S., Western Europe

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Syria

U.S.

Antiaggression (terrorism)

1992

Serbia

UN

Antiaggression (ethnic war)

1992

Turkmenistan

Russia

Domestic political influence (Russian ethnic minority)

1992

Latvia

Russia

Domestic political influence (Russian ethnic minority)

1992

Azerbaijan

Armenia

Antiaggression (war)

1992

Azerbaijan

U.S.

Antiaggression (war)

1992

Algeria

EU

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Cambodia (Khmer Rouge)

UN

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Cameroon

U.S.

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Equatorial Guineau

EU, Spain

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992

Estonia

Russia

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1992

Peru

U.S.

Domestic political influence (democratization, human rights)

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

Year Imposeda

Target

Principal Sender(s)b

Principal Objectives

1992

Togo

U.S., EU

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1992–1993, 1996

Libya

UN (1992–1993), U.S.

Antiaggression (terrorism, proliferation)

1992, 1995, 1996

Iran

U.S., Europe, and Japan (some)

Military containment, economic containment, antiaggression

1993

Guatemala

U.S., OAS, Germany

Domestic political influence (block regime change)

1993

Nigeria

U.S., British Commonwealth

Domestic political influence (democratization, human rights)

1993

Sudan

U.S.

Antiaggression (terrorism)

1993

Mauritania

U.S.

Domestic political influence (workers’ rights)

1993

Rwanda

UN

Antiaggression (civil war)

1993

Kazakhstan

Russia

Domestic political influence (ethnic minority)

1993

Macedonia

Greece

Domestic political influence (national identity)

1993

Angola-UNITA

UN

Antiaggression (civil war)

1993, 1996

China

U.S.

Antiaggression (proliferation)

1993, 1996

Pakistan

U.S.

Antiaggression (proliferation), domestic political influence, democratization

1993

India

U.S.

Antiaggression (proliferation)

1994

Gambia

U.S., UK

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1994

North Korea

U.S.

Antiaggression (proliferation)

1994

Albania

Greece

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1995

Afghanistan

U.S.

Domestic political influence (drugs, democratization)

1995

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates

U.S.

Domestic political influence (workers’ rights)

1995

Maldives

U.S.

Domestic political influence (workers’ rights)

1995

Colombia

U.S.

Domestic political influence (drug cartels)

1995

Peru, Ecuador

U.S.

Antiaggression (border war)

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

Year Imposeda

Target

Principal Sender(s)b

Principal Objectives

1996

Paraguay

U.S., OAS, Mercosur

Domestic political influence (block regime change)

1996

Nations trading with Cuba

U.S.

Domestic political influence (regime change)

1996

Nations trading with Iran, Libya

U.S.

Antiaggression (terrorism)

1996

Burma (Myanmar)

U.S.

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1996

Burundi

East African nations

Domestic political influence (regime change)

1996

Turkey

EU

Domestic political influence (human rights)

1996

Niger

U.S., France

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1997

Palestinian Authority

Israel

Antiaggression (terrorism)

1997

Kenya

World Bank

Domestic political influence (corruption)

1997

Sierra Leone

ECOWAS

Domestic political influence (democratization)

1998

India, Pakistan

U.S.

Antiaggression (proliferation)

NOTE: EU, European Union; OAS, Organization of American States; UNITA, Union for the Total Independence of Angola; ECOWAS, Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group.

aMany of these cases had preexisting sanctions as well; dates are for new sanctions imposed in the 1990s.

bCases in which both the United States and an international institution or other countries are listed indicate more extensive unilateral U.S. sanctions.

Frequency of Use

While some of the methodological issues noted earlier regarding case identification and selection complicate fully accurate case counting, the basic pattern of sanctions being used with great frequency is clear. Table 4.3, covering the 1990–1999 period, includes 59 sanctions cases. This list follows the same counting rule as in the HSE study of including newly initiated and ratcheted up sanctions but not those ongoing with minimal change from an earlier period. The 1990s total of 59 is substantially greater than the 37 for the 1970s, the highest previous total for a decade. No wonder so many see sanctions as the post-Cold War weapon of choice.

Three reasons explain this initial pattern of frequency of use. First, it

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

is indicative of the nature and scope of conflict that has been characterizing the post-Cold War international system. The initial euphoria circa 1989 of “the end of history,” “a new world order,” and the like did not last very long. The post-Cold War era is all too replete with its own extensive agenda for conflict prevention, management, and resolution.

Second is the relativity calculus, that sanctions are even more attractive as an alternative to military intervention than in earlier periods. Major powers find themselves on the one hand with weaker claims to international legitimacy for using military force than during the Cold War and greater need in this less realpolitik age for such legitimacy. Thus, for example, it was one thing for Russia to impose sanctions on Lithuania but would have been quite another had it invaded. And when the United States went beyond sanctions to military action in Haiti, it did so only after getting a separately legitimizing UN resolution. While as we will see it is often a mistake to view sanctions as a preferred alternative to military intervention, the point here is explanatory not evaluative.

Third is the shift in the U.S. domestic political dynamics of sanctions. The number and range of groups pressuring for sanctions have increased quite substantially. These particularly include ethnic and other “identity” groups (e.g., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Iran and Libya, the Cuban American National Foundation on Cuba), human rights groups on a number of issues, and the conservative Christian right on religious freedom and human rights issues. Pressures from prosanctions groups have been targeted most intensely on Congress, contributing to a shift in Congress’s role to being even more “directive” and “prescriptive” than in the past, leaving less executive discretion for deciding whether to actually impose sanctions and instead “mandating, rather than simply authorizing their use…[and] identifying the precise conditions for their removal.”54 The same politics underlie the increased imposition of sanctions by state and local governments using pension fund holdings and their procurement contracts with companies trading and investing in offending countries as a form of intra-U.S. countersanctions (e.g., Burma).

In some cases the Clinton administration sought to oppose or at least temper these pressures; in others it welcomed or at least went along with them. The business community has been the principal source of opposition to sanctions, emphasizing the much greater costs to the American economy than in the past given the greater relative importance of trade. In some cases (e.g., China, India-Pakistan) opposition has also come from the general foreign policy community. While the antisanctions forces have been gaining some ground and the dynamic has begun to shift, the prosanctions forces have tended to dominate thus far.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

Greater Economic Impact: On Target States But Also Civilian Populaces

A second main post-Cold War pattern is the increased economic impact sanctions have been having on their targets. Whereas the overall average impact on gross national product (GNP) in the original HSE study was less than 2 percent and only 2.4 percent in HSE’s success cases, double-digit effects are seen in a number of post-Cold War cases, much of which remains attributable to sanctions even taking into account self-induced factors such as corruption and internal inefficiencies.

For example, in Iraq the original 1990 sanctions had the immediate effect of cutting off 97 percent of Iraqi oil exports and over 90 percent of its imports and caused a 40 percent decline in civilian production.55 Later, in the initial aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, there was a miniboom as Saddam Hussein drew on accumulated stocks of industrial equipment, hidden cash reserves, materials stolen from Kuwait, and smuggling and transshipment routes through then-ally Jordan. And for a period thereafter Saddam was able to use rationing to provide Iraqis with food and other basic needs.56 But these compensatory measures provided only partial and temporary relief. By 1993 GDP had fallen by more than half, from $40 billion (in 1990) to $17 billion. Food imports had to be cut to about one-third of prewar levels, and the resulting shortages and black markets drove inflation up to 170 percent overall and to such astronomical levels as 350 percent for eggs, 2,857 percent for bread, and 2,222 percent for infant formula. Through both official devaluations and black market activity the Iraqi dinar plummeted from about one-third to the dollar before the Gulf War to over 3,000. Salaries of government employees were cut to the equivalent of $1 to $2 a month. From electricity to telephone service to drinking water to hospitals, the basic economic infrastructure of Iraq severely deteriorated. “Every day is worse than before,” one Iraqi told a foreign correspondent in mid-1994.57 Overall estimates are of Iraq having lost $120 billion in oil sales because of the sanctions.

In the case of Iran, as one economist put it, the sanctions “did not, by any means, create the current economic situation, but they have made a bad situation worse.”58 Iran’s economic problems were rooted most fundamentally in the softness of international oil markets and in the corruption and inefficiencies of the Iranian political system. Inflation, for example, hit 100 percent in 1994; imports were down to $12 billion, lower even than nonadjusted 1977 figures. Even though the sanctions imposed by the United States in 1995 were not fully supported by other major Western nations, because the Iranian economy was so tied to the dollar the immediate impact was quite substantial. A wave of dollar buying was set off, and the Iranian rial took an immediate plunge of 50 percent, recov-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

ering somewhat but still down by about one-third later in the year. Inflation went up even higher, indeed to the highest rates since the Iran-Iraq war, and hit consumer goods especially hard. Hard currency reserves also were being stretched, making servicing of Iran’s large debt ($4.5 billion to $6 billion) more difficult, which in turn made foreign investors and creditors more wary of providing new capital.59 This has begun to change in recent years for a number of reasons, notably the improved outlooks in the oil and gas sector, the political and economic reforms initiated since 1997 by President Mohamed Khatemi, and the increased willingness of European and other governments and companies to buck U.S. efforts to claim extraterritoriality and impose secondary sanctions. But the likely decreasing future economic impact that sanctions will have is a separate point from the impact they have had.

With Serbia in the Bosnia conflict, while also guarding against over-attribution to the effects of sanctions relative to other factors such as the Milosevic regime’s mismanagement of the economy, the overall economic picture was characterized by one observer as “terrible”: “Inflation sky-rocketed. Necessary agricultural supplies and fertilizers virtually disappeared, as did fuel, spare parts and supplies for all industry. Production fell sharply while unemployment jumped. Average salaries plummeted. …[B]y 1993 close to 80 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line.”60 GDP fell from $26.6 billion in 1990 to $10 billion in 1994. With sanctions lost trade was estimated at $20 billion.61 If sanctions were not lifted, the national bank governor direly warned in August 1994, “it’s all over for us.” Effects lingered even after the Dayton Accords were signed and the sanctions lifted, with the average monthly wage in mid-1996 only about $100, an 80 percent drop, and even then often months late in payment.62

In the India-Pakistan cases sanctions had less economic impact but still had some. The sanctions were primarily U.S. ones and were limited mostly to aid, loans, and investment financing and export credits. Nor were even these maintained for very long, first being relaxed to allow agricultural exports and then mostly lifted after less than six months. Still the economic impact was not inconsequential. In the month after the sanctions were imposed, the Indian rupee dropped about 19 percent in value, and the Bombay Stock Exchange fell about 30 percent. While still more self-reliant than most post-Cold War economies, India had been opening up more and more. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government had plans on the books for 50 projects involving over $600 million in foreign investment and was looking to increase these even further. The Pakistani economy was weaker and more vulnerable generally. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif defiantly told his people to “let them eat grass,” but fortunately for all concerned things never got to such a

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

point. This is not to say that sanctions have substantial economic impact in all cases. But the pattern of much greater economic impact than in the past is quite pronounced.

A second point, though, is the huge collateral costs being borne by civilian populaces. The number of cases in which sanctions have caused or contributed to major humanitarian crises for the civilians in a target state bearing the brunt of the economic impact, and that economic impact being so severe as to push living standards below (in some cases further below) subsistence levels, is unprecedented. The Haiti case poses this dilemma particularly sharply. Sanctions hit the already weak Haitian economy very hard. One former U.S. ambassador assessed the sanctions as having “set the Haitian economy back 15 years.” Per capita GDP, while falling by about 1 to 2 percent prior to sanctions, plummeted 25 percent in the ensuing two years. Unemployment was running 60 to 70 percent and inflation 60 percent at the time of the U.S. invasion. The agriculture sector was in “complete disarray,” including an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 displaced people. The assembly sector, a major urban employer, lost 36,000 jobs as 140 plants shut down. The loss of export earnings left Haiti $76 million in arrears to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Yet while the vast majority of the Haitian people were enormously vulnerable to this further economic deprivation, because the sanctions were so poorly targeted the regime and its supporters were minimally affected. A former Aristide government official recounts how in Creole this led to such take-offs on anbago (embargo) as anba gwo, meaning “under the heels of the rich and powerful.”63

In the case of Serbia a system was set up under UN auspices to consider requests for humanitarian exemptions for specific goods and shipments. The UN Security Council established terms of reference to guide consideration by the sanctions committees of the individual cases. One problem, though, was the sheer volume of such cases, which went from 2,000 in 1992 to 18,000 in 1993 and 34,000 by 1995.64 A second problem was that many of the shipments that were approved under humanitarian auspices were diverted to other purposes, including reselling on the black market and using the hard currency for arms purchases.

The Iraq case also is often raised, and the debate over how much responsibility falls on the international community and how much on Saddam Hussein has been a difficult one. Numerous reports by the UN and nongovernmental organizations have documented the deterioration of basic standards of subsistence, health, and nutrition for the Iraqi people. In mid-1993 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that “a vast majority of the Iraqi population” was facing “persistent dep-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

rivation, severe hunger and malnutrition” and that “larger numbers of Iraqis now have food intakes lower than those of populations in disasterstricken African countries.” In mid-1995 another UN report found the Iraqi hospitals had lost 75 percent of their pre-1990 staff and that waste-water facilities in Baghdad were running at 30 percent capacity. In late 1996 the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 4,500 children under the age of 5 were dying every month. Another FAO report in 1997 found food shortages and malnutrition to have become more “severe and chronic.”65

But provisions were offered all along to allow for humanitarian relief, with the caveat of UN control of the funds to assure that Saddam did not divert them for weapons of mass destruction or other such purposes, yet Saddam did not accept these terms until late 1996 with UN Security Council Resolution 986. Meanwhile, there were ample reports that he and his cronies manipulated the humanitarian supplies that were coming into Iraq, using them to reward supporters and punish opponents as well as reselling them at huge markups. His regime also was still finding the money to clandestinely import missile guidance systems and other weapons of mass destruction items. Still the humanitarian issue presents itself, and the Iraqi people have continued to suffer.

The other misfired economic impact has been the high collateral costs borne by third-party front-line states deprived of their natural trade partners. The lost revenues to Turkey from pipeline transit charges on Iraqi oil and other trade have been estimated at $20 billion. Among other effects, these losses contributed to the economic hardships and anti-Western resentments that helped the Islamist Refah party come to power in 1996– 1997. In the Serbia case Macedonia was particularly hard hit, sanctioned from its largest trade partner and with its land and river links to the rest of Europe cut off at the same time that to its south Greece imposed sanctions on it. In both cases these costs came on top of other factors complicating the stability of countries important in their own right to U.S. foreign policy.

Assessments of Success and Failure

As to whether this greater economic impact is being converted into policy success, for a number of reasons, including the methodological problems raised earlier, the record of sanctions success and failure is more mixed and ambiguous than proponents or opponents often acknowledge. There are few major successes but some limited and qualified ones. There are numerous failures but some that raise the false negative question of whether sanctions could have worked had mistakes not been

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

made in the strategy design and implementation. And there are other cases for which contending assessments of success or failure exist. A few cases are summarized below as examples.

Iraq: Limited and Qualified Success

With regard to the first major phase of sanctions imposed on Iraq, those immediately following its August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the assessment is largely negative. The sanctions as first established by UN Security Council Resolutions 661 and 665 did have value as an immediate response to Saddam’s invasion and one expressing the broadest possible multilateral support. But the extent of the foreign policy influence objective of compelling Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait was disproportionate to the limited instrument that even comprehensive and UN-mandated multilateral sanctions constituted. Saddam also was able to draw on the wealth he plundered from the Kuwaiti economy as a target state defense for ameliorating the economic impact of sanctions at least in the short term.

As to the post-Gulf War sanctions, some success can be attributed with regard to the military containment objective. While the problem of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has yet to be fully resolved, the basic terms of “give up your weapons and we’ll give you your oil,” as Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, the first chair of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) put it, were crucial to UNSCOM’s disarmament work.66 The more general economic denial that has cost Iraq an estimated $120 billion in lost oil revenues has also been a factor, for as Eric Melby observes, those revenues “in all likelihood would result once again in significant Iraqi expenditures for offensive military weapons.”67 It therefore is one of the less uncertain counterfactuals to conclude that without sanctions Iraq would be even more of a military threat than it still is.

Sustaining this success over time, though, has grown harder and harder. The collapse of UNSCOM in 1998 raised concerns about the unfinished business of the Iraqi threat of weapons of mass destruction as well as possible new unchecked advances. While UNSCOM’s collapse is more attributable to flaws in and failures of other aspects of U.S. and Western strategy, it exemplifies the problems that arise when the time that sanctions can buy is not used effectively. Moreover, the resumption by Russia of its role as an alternative trade partner for Iraq, reportedly providing a range of military equipment, including missiles, is a sanctions problem. While some such sales had been reported earlier, they apparently were stepped up substantially in early 1999 as sanctions fatigue increasingly set in and other policy disputes had their repercussions.68 Thus, the suc-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

cess of the Iraq sanctions at military containment is best assessed as substantial but eroding.

While claims of success also are made for the foreign policy objective of limiting Saddam’s regional influence—the helping “keep Saddam in the box” contention made by the Clinton administration—this too is time sensitive. Over time Russia, France, Turkey, and some Arab states, including Egypt, have been pushing harder for lifting many of the sanctions and for an overall shift to a less coercive and more cooperative strategy. For each of these countries the motives have been a mix of economic interests, geopolitical regional interests, and part of a broader diplomatic fencing with the United States related to other issues in the respective bilateral relationships. Whatever the particulars and irrespective of the relative merits of one position or the another, the point was that the status quo was becoming less and less tenable.

As to the regime change goal (i.e., to help bring down Saddam), sanctions have had some backfiring effects. One cannot really call it a politically integrative effect in the terms Galtung coined back in the Rhodesia case, given the nonvolitional nature of politics under a dictator as brutal as Saddam. Nevertheless, sanctions have served as a rallying point and scapegoat for channeling popular discontent into anti-Americanism. They also ended up having perverse effects on the 1995–1996 covert strategy being worked with the Kurds in northern Iraq. The further weakening of the Kurdish economy that sanctions caused set off a competition for limited economic resources that exacerbated the long-standing factional rivalry between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The KDP-PUK splits had so widened that by mid-1996 the PUK struck an alliance of convenience with Iran, in turn prompting the PUK to actually invite Saddam and his military forces in to fight on their side, all of which created a major crisis for U.S. policy.

In summary, the Iraq case exemplifies the need for differentiation among the various objectives that sanctions have so as to take into account both what has and what has not been achieved. It is based on this analysis, as well as a net assessment weighing costs incurred against gains made along the lines noted earlier, that the success claimed for Iraqi sanctions is only limited and qualified.

Iran: Mixed Assessment and the “Cross-Fire” Problem

The Iran case involves a wide array of sanctions with a range of objectives, many of which have been U.S. unilateral ones, some of which are multilateral albeit none UN authorized. Some success can be claimed for military containment, as Iran has been partially restrained in building

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

conventional and nonconventional military capacities. This was due in part to the overall economic impact from the full package of sanctions as noted earlier and the budget shortfalls and credit, forcing a scaling back of planned weapons purchases by about 35 percent.69 It also was due to the extent to which there has been substantial Western multilateral cooperation on arms, dual-use exports, and weapons of mass destruction-related exports. While there have still been intraalliance differences, there has been enough of a sense of shared interests and strong enough multilateral institutional mechanisms such as the Group of Seven (G-7), the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the Wassenaar Agreement for cooperation to prevail on military-related sanctions. The greater problem has been with North Korea, China, and Russia, the latter a particular problem with regard to nuclear and missile technology. This is a major item on the debit side of the sanctions assessment. Still it seems a balanced assessment that “Iranian efforts to acquire nonconventional weapons and expand and modernize its armed forces have been delayed and that some success can be claimed…. [T]o the extent that U.S. policy toward Iran has prevented Teheran from becoming more of a threat than it now is.”70

For the broader economic containment and foreign policy influence the United States has sought, there has been much less success, largely because of limited multilateral cooperation. When it comes to oil and gas, there is a fundamental divergence of interests between the United States on one side and Europe and Japan on the other. The United States is much less dependent overall on imports for its oil and gas consumption than are its allies. The difference is especially marked in terms of the importance of the Persian Gulf per se as reflected in respective rates for OPEC oil as a percentage of total oil imports at about 50 percent for the United States, 85 percent for Europe, and 80 percent for Japan.

This was why the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) focused its threat of countersanctions particularly against European and other investments in the Iranian energy sector. ILSA supporters claim that it has been effective, that its coercive threat helped dissuade major investments by European and other companies that had more to lose from penalties against their trade with the United States than to gain from trade and investments with Iran. Such assessments, though, seriously undervalue the costs in intraalliance tensions. ILSA was widely seen as a combination of big power bullying and as the United States playing out its own domestic politics (AIPAC laid claims to having virtually written ILSA). A major test of ILSA came in late 1997 when a $2 billion natural gas development deal was announced by the French company Total, with Russia’s Gazprom and a Malaysian company as partners. The Clinton administration took no punitive action, making its own calculation of having more to lose than to gain from doing so. The same calculation has been made on a number of ensuing oil and gas deals, albeit with various partially face-saving compromises.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

It should also be stressed that these differences were not just from divergent economic interests; they also reflected very real differences in foreign policy strategy. The United States has pushed for “dual containment,” the allies for “critical dialogue.” At various times the Europeans have stepped back from critical dialogue in reaction to particular incidents, such as the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the “Mykonos” trial, in which German courts found the Iranian government guilty of complicity in the assassination of an Iranian dissident leader in a Berlin restaurant by that name. But stepping back has not led to backing off. President Khatami’s election in 1997 was seen by many as further opening up new possibilities for critical dialogue and undercutting the argument for dual containment.

Serbia: Success? Failure? Contending Assessments

The case of Serbia shows how different analysts provide fundamentally contrasting success/failure assessments. Susan Woodward and Sonja Licht are among those who see sanctions as having been more negative than positive all along because of their unintended impact of reinforcing Milosevic’s political ideology as well as the economic position of his state apparatus in allocating scarce goods while weakening and demoralizing the opposition.71 On the other hand, others see a discernible pattern in Milosevic’s actions of responding to sanctions when they were seriously applied but reverting and deviating when he could. David Owen, the former British foreign minister who was one of the lead international negotiators in 1993–1994, writes that, “I had no doubt then, and never have doubted since that it was the prospect of financial sanctions which Milosevic most feared: the chance of avoiding any further economic misery was too attractive domestically for him to go on humoring Karadzic as he obstructed virtually any deal.”72 General Rupert Smith, commander of the UN peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, made a similar point, that Milosevic’s shift to greater willingness to enforce the sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs as he was supposed to, substantially weakened Karadzic.73

Haiti: Failure, But a False Negative?

There is no disagreement about the Haiti sanctions having failed. They did not bring down the military junta led by General Raul Cedras and restore the democratically elected regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It took U.S. military intervention to do that. But the question is whether sanctions did not work because they could not work or whether they could have worked had they been done differently. The plausibility of the question is based primarily on sanctions having been imposed partially and incrementally rather than comprehensively and decisively. Haiti was

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

the epitome of target state economic vulnerability—a small country with a weak economy, dependent on the United States for almost 70 percent of its trade, and pretty conducive to enforcement given its mostly island geography. From the start a Bush administration official stressed its particular vulnerabilities to an oil cutoff and to sanctions against its manufacturing assembly industry, which employed 35,000 people. He predicted a 60 percent chance that the sanctions would achieve their objective of bringing Aristide back to power within just two months.74 Yet six months into the sanctions exemptions were granted for American-owned assembly plants. “The mood of optimism among many who supported the coup,” The New York Times reported at the time, “turned to bravado and frankly expressed glee.”75 Moreover, in accommodating its own economic interests the United States weakened its standing for leaning on the Europeans or Latin Americans.

Nor was it until June 1993 that the Haiti sanctions finally became more comprehensive. The United States now banned from its ports all foreign ships still doing business with Haiti and froze financial and other assets of the major coup leaders. The United Nations now imposed an oil embargo. There is at least a correlation between these steps and the signing shortly thereafter of the Governor’s Island agreement setting the terms for ending the coup. But a little more than a month after the agreement was signed, the oil embargo was lifted. While intended as a carrot, this was exploited by the junta to enhance its antisanctions defenses by stockpiling oil and other key commodities and then abrogating the agreement a few months later. Other factors also entered into the junta’s decision to abrogate the agreement, but it is hard to dismiss the on-off pattern of the sanctions. Even then the U.S. and international responses kept moving only incrementally. The UN oil embargo was reimposed, but it would be another six months or so until enforcement was seriously tightened. The assets freeze was broadened to include another 41 individuals, but it was not until January 1994 that the list really expanded (another 523 names were added).76 Elliott and Hufbauer make the case that “carefully crafted financial sanctions, swiftly applied, might have captured the attention of the economic elite, without whose support the military would not be able to rule. The Haitian elite keeps little of its wealth in Haiti and enjoys spending time and money in the United States and Europe. A global assets freeze, coupled with a travel ban, would have hit primarily that class.”77 But it was a long time coming. Meanwhile the regime and its supportive elites stayed well insulated, continuing to make large sums of money off the sanctions-facilitated black market, while the suffering deepened for the masses of Haitian people the sanctions were supposed to be helping.

Another factor in raising the false negative question stems from the

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

weakness of the broader policy context, specifically the absence until the very end of a credible threat to use military force. Without this backdrop the message conveyed by the sanctions to the Haitian regime and its supportive elites was of sanctions being resorted to as a way of avoiding more serious action than a sense that more coercive steps lay on the horizon if the sanctions were not complied with.

India-Pakistan Nuclear Proliferation: Failures as Foreign Policy Influence

The 1998 case of nonproliferation sanctions against India and Pakistan is unequivocal in terms of sanctions as prevention. The Glenn amendment and other sanctions that the United States had on the books did not dissuade India from nuclear weapons testing. The “nuclear nationalism” motivations were quite strong, making for a case of disproportionality with sanctions inherently inadequate for the objectives in question, especially given the intense domestic political reactions on both sides.78 Once India had tested, threats of U.S. sanctions were sorely inadequate to prevent Pakistan from following suit. This was especially so when the G-7, which by coincidence was holding its annual summit just after the Indian nuclear tests, balked at a genuinely collective stance. This undermined the credibility of sanctions even more than their economic effects, showing that even on an issue like nuclear nonproliferation Western multilateral cooperation was problematic. Still it is worth thinking through whether had the G-7 taken serious and decisive collective action against India and cast the issue as one in which Pakistan could make significant diplomatic and economic gains, Pakistan might have made a different calculation. Whatever threads of credibility may have been left were stripped bare when under domestic political pressure the United States waived its agricultural sanctions against India.

Political Economy of Post-Cold War Sanctions and the “Vulnerability-Viability” Paradox

Other cases also could have been cited and also would have fallen short of definitively substantiating either the sanctions-don’t-work or yes-they-do schools. All told, while some definite patterns can be identified, the overarching one is a paradoxical one of greater target state vulnerability to the potential coercive potency of sanctions on the one hand but more problematic political viability in a number of respects on the other. This “vulnerability-viability” paradox is a consequence of the three major systemic changes that mark the transition to the post-Cold War era—the strategic changes of the end of bipolarity, the economic changes of glo-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

balization, and the political changes of the spread of democratization— which cut in both directions, conducive to and counter to the efficacy of sanctions.

On the target state vulnerability side, these broad systemic forces have made for a weakening of target state defenses in three respects. First, in economic terms, while the impact of globalization does vary across countries, few if any countries have been able to stay sufficiently insulated or isolated so as to not face major GDP effects from disruptions set off by economic sanctions. Broad global trends toward greater economic interdependence, openness, and transnational economic activity have been one of the strongest forces of the post-Cold War international system. The importance of trade, investment, finance, and other international economic relations has been increasing for virtually all states at least in relative terms. Notwithstanding the normal benefits of these trends, the effect here is to make for greater susceptibility to economic impact from sanctions. Nor is this just a matter of initial disruptive effects. Autarky and domestic substitution are not as viable as target state defenses as they were in earlier less economically globalized periods.

A number of recent cases from Africa show this dynamic with respect to aid conditionality. Larry Diamond cites Malawi, where the joint decision by international donors in May 1992 to freeze $74 million in aid “compelled” the Banda dictatorship to liberalize. A national referendum on multiparty elections was called, which the regime lost, and then was “severely crushed” in actual multiparty elections. Conversely but consistently, in Togo in 1991, less than a week after French President Francois Mitterand weakened the French stance on aid conditionality, a coup was launched to stop the democratic transition. More generally, as Diamond concludes from these and other cases, “if aid dependence is extreme enough, as it is in much of Africa, and the donor community is sufficiently united…even a regime in which hard-liners predominate may have little choice but to give in to the pressure (or face financial collapse).”79

Second is the strategic context of the end of bipolarity. While alternative trade partners still can be a significant factor, absent the geopolitical incentives of the Cold War, it is much more difficult for target states to find a protector, as Tito’s Yugoslavia was able to get from the West and Castro’s Cuba from the Soviet Union. Also there is the increased use by the United Nations of its sanctions authority, broadening the coalition and establishing its legitimacy in ways only the UN can. Indeed, the UN has authorized more sanctions in the 1990s than in its entire previous history—for example, against Iraq, all of the former Yugoslavia (arms embargo), Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Haiti, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and Rwanda. The same holds true

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

albeit in more limited ways for regional multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Organization for African Unity (OAU), all of which used sanctions in the 1990s.

Third is the spread of democracy and the consequent fostering of transmission belts in places they did not previously exist. One does not have to become a democratic triumphalist, with the attendant underestimations of the instabilities and uncertainties that the institutionalization of democracy will continue to face for a long time to come to acknowledge the trend in this direction.80 The effect of this trend combined with the economic globalization one is that more groups in target states have interests at risk to sanctions, and these groups are more likely to be in a position to transmit their concerns about those interests in a politically meaningful way.

The Guatemala 1993 and Paraguay 1996 cases provide examples. Both involved efforts to turn back antidemocracy coups. Guatemala stood to lose $67 million in direct aid, trade, and investment benefits under both the GSP (Generalized System of Preferences) and the CBI (Caribbean Basin Initiative) and a World Bank loan. For Paraguay, even more than its economic relations with the United States, the threat from its Mercosur partners, with which total trade had grown from $4 billion in 1990 to $13 billion in 1995, risked becoming a major economic disruption.81 In both cases key elites acted as transmission belts:

Most important, it seems, was the concern of business leaders that Guatemala’s rising exports to the United States and Europe could be devastated if threatened sanctions were imposed. Within hours of an American threat to cut Guatemala’s trade benefits, business leaders who in the past had supported authoritarian rule began pressing government and military officials to reverse Mr. Serrano’s actions.82

Paraguay’s business and professional classes are now reliant upon external markets and supplies…. [The sanctions] send shivers through the country’s commercial classes, and helped convince Oviedo’s fellow officers that he could not prevail…. [T]he recent episode presents in stark terms the powerful links between commercial ties and democratic stability in the Western Hemisphere.83

This constitutes a very significant shift in the Latin American political economy. Economic elites and the military had long been far more inclined toward authoritarian than democratic rule. It may well be that their intrinsic preferences still are not particularly prodemocracy. But the combination of the generally more moderate nature of the democratic forces and the new calculus of their self-interests based on the greater importance of international economic relationships has made these elites more susceptible to international influence.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

On the other hand, other aspects of these same systemic trends have made the political viability of sanctions more problematic. Economic globalization also has intensified the political gain/civilian pain tradeoff from sanctions misfiring and setting off humanitarian crises through their massive effects on civilian populaces. Some have questioned whether in such cases sanctions are to be seen as “an alternate to war or an alternative form of war…. If the harm they [the sanctions] cause is like that caused by war, are they, in fact, morally superior to war? And even if the harm caused does not compare with that caused by war, how can one justify imposing even a lesser harm on the civilian population?”84

There are also cross-cutting trends with regard to alternative trade partners. While Russia and China are no longer U.S. adversaries, they are still rivals for influence in post-Cold War geopolitics, as evident in cases like Iraq, Iran, and India-Pakistan. Within the Western alliance, without the overriding rationale of a common enemy and first-order security threat, Europe and Japan are more inclined to take foreign policy initiatives that may be inconsistent with those of the United States and to give salience to their economic interests. The Persian Gulf again is a prime example, particularly the Iran case. In this case and especially in the Cuba case the intraalliance feuding set off by the U.S. secondary sanctions and claims of extraterritoriality has been exacerbated by the extent to which U.S. policies are seen as being heavily motivated by domestic politics. Moreover, there are more and more countries that, thanks to the diffusion of technology and capital that have come with economic globalization, are in a position to act as alternative trade partners. They may not be able to totally replace the United States or other major industrial countries, but they can assuage some of the economic impact. Malaysia, for example, was among those pursuing major energy-sector investments in Iran, through its state-owned Petronas Company. South Africa was pursuing arms sales exports to Syria. Numerous other examples could be cited as well.

With regard to the UN and regional multilateral organizations, there are both limits and exceptions to the trend identified earlier. In cases like Libya the UN sanctions were far less than the United States sought. And in other cases the UN has not acted in large part because of the resistance of member states that feared further strengthening precedents legitimizing international action to intervene in domestic affairs. The Nigeria case in part exemplifies this. The push for sanctions came in response to the nullification by the military regime of the June 1993 presidential election, clearly won by the opposition candidate Chief Moshood Abiola, and the ensuing brutal violations of human rights, including the execution of the internationally renowned dissident Ken Saro-Wiwa and the assassination of the wife of Chief Abiola. Yet the most that came out of the UN General Assembly in the Nigeria case was a nonbinding resolution calling on the

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

UN Human Rights Commission to “give urgent attention” to the situation in Nigeria—and even that drew 42 abstentions and 12 negative votes, the latter coming from 10 African countries as well as China and Iran.

As to the democratization trend, those types of regimes that had been least permeable still are—for example, highly personalized dictatorships as in Iraq and Cuba and a strong single-party state as in China. Sanctions against these regimes and others like them thus continue to be limited in what they can achieve. The boomerang effect of sanctions setting off politically integrative reactions also remains possible in a number of political systems, especially when the sanctions have domestic political influence objectives and are imposed overtly and “loudly.”

It is in large part because of this vulnerability-viability paradox and the ways in which both proponents and opponents of sanctions can argue that the post-Cold War political economy favors their positions that sanctions are more politically contentious than they have ever been. In the past there were specific case controversies, like over the 1980 Soviet grain embargo. In recent years, though, it has been one case after—actually, on top of—another. Opposition to sanctions comes principally from the business community. Some of its estimates of the costs incurred are open to question and are taken up below as a separate analytical point that bears on net assessments of unilateral sanctions. The relevant point here is that the increased opposition in itself reflects the greater relative importance of trade in the American domestic political economy. Just since 1980 exports as a share of U.S. GDP increased almost 50 percent, from 8.5 to 12.3 percent. Moreover, exports have accounted for a disproportionate one-third share of overall economic growth, including a startling 65.3 percent in the recession year 1990. Exports also tend to be associated with higher-paying jobs, with an estimated 5 to 15 percent differential.85

More general foreign policy considerations also motivate opponents of sanctions, as manifested along one or both of two lines of argument. One is a questioning of the conception of interests underlying sanctions when they are motivated by a particular issue seen as being given undue emphasis in the context of the overall set of issues and interests in the bilateral relationship (e.g., the China case). The other is more a question of the utility of sanctions in those cases in which they are seen as a weak substitute for the use of military force or other more concerted coercive action, in effect raising the proportionality problem between the nature of the issue and the instruments selected (e.g., Iraq).

The strongest support for sanctions has come from ethnic and other “identity” groups. The Jewish-American lobby was a key force behind the Iran sanctions, both unilateral and extraterritorial secondary; so, too, with the Cuban-American lobby and Helms-Burton. In precisely these ways these cases also exemplify the interaction effect across different dimen-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

sions of the political economy of sanctions, as one of the reasons for European and Japanese ire about the Iran and Cuba sanctions was their blatancy as externalized domestic politics. Human rights groups also tend to be prosanctions. Their role is particularly noteworthy in the ways that they have taken the politics of sanctions to the state and local levels. This started in the 1980s with the antiapartheid sanctions, and its success in that case became a model that has been emulated and expanded.

Sanctions at this level usually are through prohibitions on state and local government pension fund holdings and contracting with companies trading and investing in offending countries, in effect a form of intra-U.S. secondary sanctions. In the Burma case, for example, cities such as San Francisco, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, and Madison (Wisconsin) imposed their own sanctions, and a number of state governments considered similar action.86

These and other opponents of sanctions also make their own claims about the national interest and invoke core national principles. Issues like relations with Iran or how best to facilitate a democratic transition in Cuba do not have consensual answers, and politics aside there is room for serious policy debate. So too with human rights and other issues that raise difficult questions about tradeoffs and prioritization between values and other interests.87 We “don’t want to make the gross national product the be-all and end-all of American foreign policy and trade relationships,” stated one Christian right leader. “There are other American values which are higher.” Again the politics are obvious, but there is a debate to be had.

In summary, target states generally are more vulnerable than they used to be. Their economies are more open, they are less likely to find a great power protector, and they are more likely to feel pressure from domestic elites. Sanctions can hit and they can hurt more than in previous eras. They unquestionably have potential coercive potency. But their political viability is problematic in a number of respects. International coalitions are harder to build than before on some issues; on others not harder but also not much easier. The very economic impacts that sanctions now can have raise tough ethical issues and deep humanitarian concerns. Domestic U.S. politics are deeply divided and highly contentious, a more salient issue for groups on both sides.

It would be one thing if we could simply conclude either that sanctions really just do not work or that they are push-button easy to wield. It would be even easier if we could just say that the patterns are largely the same as during the Cold War. But none of these hold up. The post-Cold War political economy of sanctions definitely has changed in significant ways, but these changes do not cut strictly one way or the other. In some respects sanctions have more potential efficacy than before. In other re-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

spects it is more problematic to tap that efficacy—thus the paradox and the policy dilemmas.

TOWARD A STRATEGY OF “SANCTIONS REALISM”: CHALLENGES FOR THEORY AND POLICY

One thing we can be sure of is that international conflict prevention and resolution will remain crucial in the post-Cold War era. The post-Cold War world, as we most assuredly know by now, is not one in which history is over, or war is obsolescent, or some new order will spring forth like Athena from Zeus’s head. Security threats, other interstate conflicts, ethnic conflicts and civil wars, and violations of democracy and human rights will be with us far into the foreseeable future. The international community thus needs as many tools of statecraft at its disposal as possible.

Sanctions can and should be one of those tools. The post-Cold War changes that have made target states more vulnerable mean that sanctions can work, but they do not guarantee that sanctions will work. Problems of political viability also have increased, which is why this is cast as a paradox. And when sanctions do fail, it is not just that success is not achieved but that significant costs and consequences have to be borne, economic of course but also often strategic, political, and humanitarian.

Sanctions thus can neither be written off nor turned to as a default option—not by the United States, the United Nations, or others in the international community. What is needed is a strategy of “sanctions realism,” one that takes into account both the scope and the limits, the possibilities and the requisites, for sanctions’ efficacy. Doing this poses challenges for policy that not only have political aspects but also could be informed and facilitated by further theory development and scholarly research in the sanctions literature. We thus come back to the coercive bargaining framework that has guided our analysis as the basis for drawing policy implications.

Post-Cold War Political Economy of Sanctions: “Mini-Maxing” the Vulnerability-Viability Paradox

The crucial change giving sanctions more potential efficacy than before is the heightened vulnerability of target states especially to the economic impact of sanctions and also, albeit with some exceptions, to the political conversion of that economic impact. But the concomitant increase in problems of political viability constrains the capacity to actualize this potential. The key policy challenge thus is a “mini-max” one; that is, how

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

to manage this vulnerability-viability paradox so as to minimize the problems impeding the latter and maximize the potentiality of the former.

Maximizing the Prospects for Multilateral Cooperation

Of all the factors identified, the most important in the post-Cold War context is multilateral cooperation. In those cases in which false negative questions were raised, one of the key issues was the alternative trade partner problem and the greater likely efficacy if there had been greater multilateral cooperation. The difficult but essential question is the malleability of this factor. Could greater multilateral cooperation have been achieved and, if so, how? Or is the lack thereof to be treated as a limiting parameter? The policy lessons fundamentally depend on which is true. The answer is perhaps the single most important sanctions-related area for further research, both at the case level and more broadly regarding theories of cooperation.

The most contentious conflicts over sanctions in the post-Cold War era have been intra-Western. Some of this is inevitable given differences in interests, both economic and geopolitical. And it must be added that “ally bashing” often has its political benefits at home, be it by or of the United States. But surely the scope and intensity of these battles can be scaled back.

The basic terms for an intraalliance sanctions strategy compromise that maximizes shared interests are for the less frequent but more concerted use of sanctions. The threat of serious Western collective action on sanctions is vital to sanctions having the credibility needed as part of making the threat sufficiently formidable to deter and prevent. The allies would need to be more willing to acknowledge that sanctions can work and to agree that when sanctions are used they will be backed by strong unity, including follow through on their enforcement and maintenance. For their part they cannot take freedom of foreign policy action to the point of free riding on U.S.-supplied security. On issues such as nonproliferation, deterrence of interstate aggression, antiterrorism, and ethnic conflict in Europe, there are fundamental shared interests at stake. They are not always sufficiently recognized as such, but they are.

The U.S. part of the strategic compromise would be to be more selective on when it pushed its allies for joint action on sanctions. In particular it would recognize that cooperation is least likely when sanctions are largely externalizations of American domestic politics in the garb of security or foreign policy concerns and/or when the means of leverage are secondary sanctions based on claims of extraterritoriality. We have seen that these types of and approach to sanctions have a long history of being highly contentious within the Western alliance. The post-Cold War con-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

text makes this even more the case, especially when the political motivations are as unmistakable as they were in the Helms-Burton Act and ILSA.

There is an argument to be made that secondary sanctions targeted at the firm level can have impact.88 If forced to choose, few foreign firms would opt for their business in the Soviet or Cuban or even Iranian markets over doing business with and in the United States. This speaks to the continued quasi-monopsonistic power the United States has because of the sheer size of the American market. One of the key factors such an argument inadequately takes into account, though, is the interceding of those foreign firms’ own governments to pass their own domestic laws prohibiting compliance with U.S. extraterritorial assertions. Moreover, the reverberations and fallout are quite high collateral costs in their own right. American leverage is far from insubstantial, but it is a more finite asset than it used to be and thus strategically wise not to expend it indiscriminately.

On sanctions seeking military containment objectives, Russia and China also enter the picture. It would indeed be unrealistic to ignore the differences of interests that are inherent to the mix of cooperation and rivalry in these post-Cold War relationships. The target states with which the United States is most concerned regarding proliferation and military capabilities generally—Iran and Iraq, Pakistan and India—are states with which Russia and China have their own strong geopolitical interests to pursue, both viz their respective rivalries with the United States and with each other. This will not be easy to resolve. It means striking a balance between not risking broader damage to the strategic relationship from conflict on one particular issue but also not being prone to Russia or China playing on this concern for reverse leverage.

Another key is to strengthen and expand the United Nations and regional institutions. The UN Security Council needs to act more expeditiously and firmly in imposing sanctions, including using its authority to authorize interdiction and other military operations to enforce sanctions. Also, the gap between the sanctions imposed by the Security Council and the UN’s capacity to effectively monitor and enforce them needs to be closed. One approach could be, as John Stremlau proposed, the creation of a new Collective Measures Committee, building on the useful but still-born ideas of the early 1950s, the mandate of which would be “seeking the removal of the structural obstacles to implementing sanctions resolutions and to proposing ways to improve the chances that sanctions will succeed.”89 The Collective Measures Committee also could be one of the mechanisms for providing assistance to national governments in improving their capacities to enforce their sanctions. Most UN sanctions resolutions even when making sanctions mandatory have left to individual states the decisions and procedures for enforcing compliance. Thus, as Christopher Joyner writes, “the real effectiveness of international sanc-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

tions essentially turns on decision-makers in national governments.”90 Such efforts also need to include more effective coordination against global front companies and other methods of sanctions busting. These have been favorite target state strategies for undercutting the economic impact of sanctions, especially as it affects themselves. Additionally there is the credibility-undermining effect if official statements are claiming tough sanctions yet the target knows it is getting what it needs clandestinely.

Minimizing Target State Defenses

Another part of the policy challenge is making sanctions effective against governments that lack transmission belts or, for that matter, much of any kind of openness and permeability. Sanctions against regimes like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq will continue to be limited in the impact they can have especially for foreign policy influence and domestic political change objectives. Yet the range of states so excluded from the reach of sanctions has been diminishing. China, for example, is likely to continue to be highly resistant to pressures on domestic political issues but much less incontrovertibly resistant for other objectives. The failure of sanctions in cases like Haiti and Nigeria, dictatorships to be sure, had more to do with the strategy as pursued than with inherent limits based on the nature of the regime. More generally, economic globalization and the interests thus created in the international economy for elites and other groups, combined with the opening up of more and more political systems through democratization, will continue to create increased opportunities for transmission belt effects.

The Political Gain/Civilian Pain Dilemma

To be sure, as a number of recent cases have shown, flawed sanctions can end up doing significant damage to the states and peoples they are supposed to help. Surely if the “civilian pain” side of the calculus is much higher than the “political gain” one, sanctions must be assessed as net negative. The same can be argued if the political gain is relatively high but the civilian pain of achieving it also is. Precisely because sanctions now can have so much greater economic impact than in the past, the humanitarian issues and ethical considerations are difficult.

Yet so too can that be said of the consequences of inaction. As in the case of Nigeria, amidst the failure to impose anything more than partial sanctions, the military regime considered itself free to intensify and spread its repression. The point here is similar to the other side of the coin with “ripeness” theory—that waiting for a process to reach the point when it

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

seems opportune to take action also risks allowing “rotting” to set in.

Clearly there are difficult moral choices all around. Sanctions with high misfiring collateral costs can pose grave humanitarian-socioeconomic crises; inaction by sanctions can pose its own humanitarian-human rights crises. The optimizing strategy again would be for the threat of sanctions to be sufficiently credible that it could be invoked without sanctions actually being imposed or to make sanctions as effective as possible as quickly as possible. The former point relates to the discussion above of maximizing the credibility of the threat that sanctions will be multilateral. The latter point ties in to the discussion of targeting strategy below.

The United States and the Debate Over Unilateral Sanctions

The United States, in particular the U.S. Congress, has been using unilateral sanctions more in recent years than ever before. This has engendered increasingly intensive debate, with strong opposition from the U.S. business community.91 Many of the issues raised are very political and do not relate directly to the particular concern herein with sanctions and international conflict resolution. Two points, though, seem most pertinent.

First, even if one accepted the argument as made during the Cold War about the utility of unilateral U.S. sanctions for message-sending/ leadership-asserting purposes, its salience is significantly less today. For sanctions to convey the credibility needed to coerce behavioral changes in targets, it is much more important in the post-Cold War context that the international community speak with a single voice than there be one loud voice amidst multilateral cacophony. There are times when the United States needs to take the initial action unilaterally in an effort to set the pace and get others to follow. But that is tactically different than simply going its own way. Messages as received are not necessarily the same as messages as sent and intended. Unilateral sanctions may convey isolation and disunity rather than resolve. To the extent that the United States or any other sender state is constrained by domestic political pressures from imposing sanctions, it risks being saddled with the “bluffer’s dilemma.” For when, as Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr argue in a more general context, a government is prevented “from pursuing certain policies or using certain capabilities, the credibility of that government declines in the eyes of other states. Its ability to influence them shrinks as its reputation as a ‘bluffer’ grows.”92

Second, though, is the what’s-the-alternative question. The business community’s response has focused almost exclusively on establishing rigorous criteria to circumscribe the use of unilateral sanctions.93 It is

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

insufficient, however, to simply claim a trickle-down-like effect of contributing to a nation’s growth, having a “moderating influence,” and “contribut[ing] by example.”94 An array of alternatives need to be presented and pursued, such as voluntary codes of conduct, clear corporate policies that establish the importance of human rights and the rule of law, and cooperation between multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations on democratization and other programs in these areas. Incentives can at times work better than sanctions for conflict resolution but only if they do not become blank checks and their conditions are enforced.

A number of calls are being made for process reform in U.S. policy, for a more deliberative process with more access and check points for assessing the range of interests at stake and the groups affected. Some even call for “sanctions impact” statements akin to environmental impact statements and a comparable process of review prior to action. Disciplining Congress’s tendency to invoke sanctions with more rhetoric than analysis, and the executive branch’s tendency to fall back on them as a default option, would be a positive development. But the real contribution will come only if the deliberative process can help forge the political will to meet the requisites for making sanctions more effective when they are used, for thinking analytically about what the limits of using them are, and for doing more to develop alternatives.

Key Elements of Effective Design of Sanctions’ Strategy

The post-Cold War cases largely reinforce the basic patterns and conditions as identified analytically and from earlier periods regarding objectives, targeting, enforcement, and the broader policy context.

Objectives

First, with respect to objectives, the general rule of proportionality is again borne out. The basic parameter of greater effectiveness for limited objectives over extensive ones still holds. Sanctions at their most are a strategy of measured coerciveness. The “fit” between strategy and objectives therefore is most congruent with respect to objectives that are limited in scope.

As to the three types of objectives, none are inherently nonachievable through sanctions. The important analytical point is that each has somewhat different requisites. In many cases seeking domestic political influence, universal multilateral cooperation may not be necessary. Even if some trade seeps in, so long as the sanctions coalition includes the states that are the target’s principal trading partners and that politically are

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

most relevant, both the economic impact and the political credibility of the sanctions can be sufficient to have an impact (e.g., sanctions by the OAS and Mercosur against Paraguay). For antiaggression objectives the requisite coalition tends to be a bit broader as all the major global powers are likely to come into play in one aspect or another.

For military containment the requisites are at once easier and more difficult. As noted, intra-Western cooperation has been more readily achieved. But Russia and China play larger roles. Ultimately, the objective is to prevent the target state from acquiring certain military capabilities. Sanctions with less than universal cooperation still may succeed in slowing the acquisition, imposing additional costs, and even limiting the level of capability, but only with full multilateral cooperation can actual denial be achieved.

Economic Strategic Targeting

One of the strongest conclusions to be drawn from recent cases is the fundamental flaws in partial incremental sanctions. This was the most frequently used targeting strategy and consistently contributed to the limits and inefficacy of the sanctions. We already discussed the Haiti case and the questions as to whether sanctions imposed comprehensively and decisively might have worked. The 1993 sanctions against Nigeria raise similar questions. Whereas Nigerian oil exports amounted to over $1 billion a year and accounted for 90 percent of Nigeria’s export earnings and 80 percent of government revenue, the sanctions as imposed in a limited fashion by the United States, Britain, and some Commonwealth countries did not include oil. Had comprehensive sanctions been imposed that included oil, would the military regime still have resisted or would it have conceded to the pressure? The Nigerian economy already was in quite bad shape. Unemployment was estimated to be as high as 40 percent in Lagos; inflation exceeded 50 percent; the currency had to be devalued; and debt rescheduling negotiations with the International Monetary Fund were not going well. Given their economic vulnerabilities and with Abiola having demonstrated what noted Africanist scholar Crawford Young assesses as “a remarkably broad distribution of electoral support,”95 there could have been some transmission belt effect of business and other influential groups whose interests stood to be negatively affected by the sanctions reinforcing the political opposition with their own pressure. General Abacha also may not have felt as free to act if he were convinced the international community genuinely intended to impose significant costs.

These and other cases strongly support the greater strategic logic of comprehensive decisive sanctions. They are a more formidable threat both

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

economically and in terms of credibility, they hit harder if imposed, and they recognize that time often is not on the side of sanctions. The HSE study and other past studies stressed this, and it is even truer in recent cases where we have seen severe humanitarian crises and a neutron-bomb-like effect of destroying the target’s economy but leaving the regime standing. Moreover, the longer sanctions last the harder they are to maintain as sanctions fatigue sets in. Front-line states grow especially restless because of the costs they must bear. Leakage increases over time. Black markets get organized.

To be sure, the main question posed is political: if it is so difficult to get multilateral cooperation with limited sanctions, how could cooperation be expected with comprehensive ones? But there is an argument to be made that the economic costs to sanctioning states may actually be less, not more. If the strategy works and the sanctions achieve their objective more quickly, the larger “unit” costs but for a shorter period of time can end up being less than smaller unit costs stretched out over a much longer period of time through the graduated sanctions approach. Moreover, there is the possibility that the greater credibility of the more decisive threat can actually achieve the goal without ever having to get to the point of actual imposition.

Also one of the lessons learned from cases like Haiti and Serbia, in which financial assets were targeted only very late in the game, was the importance of doing this more fully and more quickly. Financial sanctions can be strategically targeted at the assets of the target regime and its principal supporters. They can also be aimed fairly well so as to reduce collateral costs. And they can be more effectively enforced than trade sanctions (although not totally so given banking havens and other money-laundering mechanisms). The key, though, is “quick, decisive action” so as to “prevent the target from moving funds and enlisting the cooperation of banks and governments that are unwilling to make such disclosures.”96

Enforcement

The cases discussed above also show the problems entailed in effective enforcement of sanctions. Even in the context of the 1999 NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo, proposals for strict and intrusive enforcement of sanctions were so controversial they had to be scaled back. On the other hand, the Serbia-Bosnia sanctions case shows what can be achieved when there is the will to impose strict enforcement and resources are committed. To be sure, the mechanisms of the “sanctions assistance missions” (SAMs) was far from watertight. Even once they started to be firmed up in 1993, goods got through. There was also the problem of how to allow for humanitarian exemptions yet make sure they were in fact

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

humanitarian and then not diverted to other purposes, including reselling on the black market and using the hard currency for arms purchases. The UN Security Council established terms of reference to guide consideration by the sanctions committees of the individual cases, but the sheer volume of such cases was a problem in itself. Still, the SAMs were effective overall and showed that with enough resources sanctions can be effectively enforced even under very difficult geographic and political circumstances.

Broader Policy Context

Finally, as to the broader policy context the point here remains what has been emphasized throughout. To the extent that sanctions are seen as a means for evading tougher action in a conflict situation that requires it, their chances for success are reduced substantially. They can be an effective part of a broader coercive strategy, indeed in some situations the lead part, but this needs to be manifested positively and assertively, not resorted to as a default option. A number of examples could be cited here, but the Iraqi case especially makes the point that, even in a case with such extensive multilateral support and such comprehensive sanctions, the overall success of sanctions requires that the other pieces of the overall strategy be sound and functional.

Further Considerations for a Research Agenda

A number of questions and areas where a stronger understanding of the theoretical dimensions and underpinnings of sanctions would be beneficial already have been stated. Others are implied, and hopefully inspired, by the overall discussion.

There are two further points on a research agenda. One is the need to work through the conceptual and methodological issues that have been identified. We will not be able to have better theories about the efficacy of sanctions unless we have sounder empirical bases for developing and testing those theories. Reliability and validity problems plague both the dependent variable assessment of the impact of sanctions and the independent variable analysis of causal attribution. Part of what is needed is an empirical database that allows for what Alexander George calls “process tracing.” We need to have both the quantity and the quality of data to allow for cases to be analyzed in depth and questions about the extent of the impact of sanctions to be answered more systematically.97

Finally, more and better research and theorizing are needed on alternatives to sanctions. It is not enough to just recognize where sanctions will not work when there are issues to be dealt with; what can work also

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

must be identified and acted on. What about incentives, carrots, inducements? To what extent are these alternatives to sanctions? To what extent are they potential complements? If complements, what are the key conditions for tapping their synergy? In more specific terms, what are the possibilities and conditions for such options as voluntary codes of corporate conduct, cooperation between multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations on civil society/democratization programs, and other ideas and strategies that reach out to other areas of study?

Conclusions

While it is often easier to get action on sanctions when conflicts are active and threats are imminent and the need for policy action is more explicitly evident, sanctions as conflict resolution strategies have the difficulties inherent in all efforts to compel policy change or reverse a new status quo. As with other strategies, sanctions also need to follow more of a conflict prevention approach. Yet doing this with sanctions involves many of the same difficulties as with other forms of preventive statecraft. Most especially there is the problem of political will. Policy makers tend to prefer to act only when absolutely necessary, which usually means later rather than earlier. They are more attuned to the immediate costs that a policy incurs and the short-term risks that it runs than to arguments about longer-term costs and benefits. Bureaucracies are even harder than usual to move when the issue is not clear and present. And that is within each government, let alone adding on the need for multilateral coordination.

Yet even in such terms preventive statecraft does have a strong logic, as another study I have been involved with strongly shows.98 Whereas the costs of waiting to act tend to be assumed to be less than the costs of acting preventively, in sanctions cases as well as all too many other post-Cold War conflicts, the costs have proven to be much greater than expected and arguably more than those for preventive action would have been. This also comes back to the basic tenet of compellence being more difficult than deterrence or other forms of prevention. It also is the case that many interests dismissed as being of insufficient importance to warrant action end up cascading to greater importance as their conflicts intensify and spread, thus calling into question this part of the original calculus as well.

It is always easiest if either a foreign policy strategy that is difficult is not all that necessary or if one that is necessary is not all that difficult. The use of economic sanctions for international conflict resolution in the post-Cold War era is both difficult and necessary. Heightened target state vulnerability creates opportunities, while more problematic political vi-

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

ability poses challenges. Sanctions realism requires prudent weighing of where the constraints of political viability are so unmalleable as to need to be treated as limiting parameters, combined with strategic assessments of the optimal strategies for maximizing the efficacy of sanctions for conflict resolution within those parameters. It needs to be recognized both that sanctions can be net negative, not just nonpositive, and that inaction and delayed action risk a worsening of the conflicts. These are difficult analyses but necessary ones in a world in which conflict resolution requires as many effective strategies as possible.

NOTES

1  

David A.Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 55–57. See also Henry Bienen and Robert Gilpin, “An Evaluation of the Use of Economic Sanctions to Promote Foreign Policy Objectives, with Special Reference to the Problem of Terrorism and the Promotion of Human Rights,” a report prepared for the Boeing Corporation, April 2, 1979; Charles P.Kindleberger, Power and Money: The Economics of International Politics and the Politics of International Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 97; Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 205–206; Margaret P.Doxey, Economic Sanctions and International Enforcement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 139; Johan Galtung, “On the Effects of Sanctions, with Examples from Rhodesia,” p. 409; Donald L.Losman, International Economic Sanctions: The Cases of Cuba, Israel and Rhodesia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), p. 140; Robert A.Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” International Security, 22 (Fall 1997), pp. 90–136.

2  

Baldwin, Economic Statecraft, p. 144.

3  

M.S.Daoudi and M.S.Dajani, Economic Sanctions: Ideals and Experience (Boston: Routledge and Kegan-Paul, 1983), p. 12; Barry E.Carter, International Economic Sanctions: Improving the Haphazard U.S. Legal Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 233; Lisa L.Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 250; Jonathan Kirshner, Currency and Coercion: The Political Economy of International Monetary Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 166; Elizabeth S.Rogers, “Using Economic Sanctions to Control Regional Conflicts,” Security Studies, 5 (Summer 1996), p. 72.

4  

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J.Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott (hereafter HSE), Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, two volumes (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990).

5  

George A.Lopez and David Cortright, “Economic Sanctions in Contemporary Global Relations,” in D.Cortright and G.A.Lopez, eds., Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacekeeping in a Post-Cold War World? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), p. 4.

6  

The term and the approach are based on Alexander L.George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993).

7  

HSE, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, vol. 1, pp. 41–42.

8  

Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” and the two follow-up exchanges, Kimberly Ann Elliott, “The Sanctions Glass: Half-Full or Completely Empty?,” and Robert A.Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work,” International Security, 23 (Summer 1998); and David A.Baldwin and Robert A.Pape, “Evaluating Economic Sanctions,” International Security 23 (Fall 1998), pp. 189–198.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

9  

Kim Richard Nossal, “International Sanctions as International Punishment,” International Organization, 43 (Spring 1989), p. 304.

10  

Baldwin, Economic Statecraft, pp. 55–57.

11  

Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” pp. 93–97.

12  

The variation is in the number of objectives, the basis for differentiation, and other ways. For example: modest policy change, destabilization, disruption of military adventures, military impairment, other major policy changes (HSE, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered); policy change, costs imposition, demonstration of resolve, domestic politics (Baldwin, Economic Statecraft); primary, secondary, tertiary [James Barber, “Economic Sanctions as a Policy Instrument,” International Affairs (London), 55 (July 1979)]; formal, undisclosed, implicit [Sidney Weintraub, ed., Economic Coercion and U.S. Foreign Policy: Implications of Case Studies from the Johnson Administration (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)]; instrumental, symbolic-expressive [Johan Galtung, “On the Effects of International Sanctions, with Examples from the Case of Rhodesia,” World Politics, 19 (April 1967)]; compliance, subversion, deterrence, international symbolism, domestic symbolism [James M.Lindsay, “Trade Sanctions as Policy Instruments: A Re-examination,” International Studies Quarterly, 30 (June 1986)]; punishment to compel, to deter, for retribution (Nossal, “International Sanctions as International Punishment”); take or defend territory, change military behavior, change ruling regime or internal political structure (Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work”).

13  

National Research Council, Committee on International Conflict Resolution, “Draft Guidelines for Commissioned Papers” (n.d.).

14  

Alexander L.George, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Thomas S.Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

15  

Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, When Does Deterrence Succeed and How Do We Know?, Occasional Paper #8 (Ottawa: Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, 1990). Elizabeth S.Rogers [“Using Economic Sanctions to Control Regional Conflicts,” Security Studies, 5 (Summer 1996), p. 50] makes a similar point regarding sanctions cases.

16  

Thomas G.Weiss, David Cortright, George A.Lopez, and Larry Minear, eds., Political Gain and Civilian Pain: Humanitarian Impact of Economic Sanctions (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

17  

Baldwin draws on conceptual and theoretical work on credibility particularly by Schelling to argue that the willingness to bear costs is “a standard indicator of the intensity of one’s resolve” and thus in certain situations is “a desirable attribute in a policy alternative” (Economic Statecraft, p. 107). Lisa Martin (Coercive Cooperation) also finds a direct and strong relationship between the sender’s self-imposed costs and its ability to gain the cooperation of other states.

18  

Baldwin, Economic Statecraft, p. 15.

19  

George, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, p. 250.

20  

Philip E.Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 5,17.

21  

See, for example, Bruce W.Jentleson, ed., Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

22  

My thanks to Paul Stern for his input on this point, drawing on his work with Daniel Druckman (see Chapter 2).

23  

Rogers, “Using Sanctions to Control Regional Conflicts,” p. 49.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

24  

George, Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, Schelling, Arms and Influence and the Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

25  

T.Clifton Morgan and Valerie Schwebach, “Fools Suffer Gladly: The Use of Economic Sanctions in International Crises,” International Studies Quarterly, 41 (March 1997), pp. 27–50.

26  

Jonathan Kirshner, “The Microfoundations of Economic Sanctions,” Security Studies, 6 (Spring 1997).

27  

Albert O.Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 14.

28  

NATO nations, which as of 1948 accounted for only 38.5 percent of Yugoslavian imports and 30 percent of its exports, by 1954 had increased their shares to 78.5 and 71.5 percent, respectively. In the Cuba case the Soviet bloc’s share of Cuban trade soared from 2 to 77.4 percent.

29  

Thus, for example, in the case of Rhodesia, the passage by the U.S. Congress in 1971 of the Byrd amendment authorizing imports of Rhodesian chrome, and thus defecting from the sanctions initiated by its closest ally Britain and endorsed by the United Nations, led the Rhodesian Herald to editorialize on this “wonderful boost for Rhodesian morale…a signal to the world that sanctions are not important enough to warrant serious sacrifices” [Harry R.Strack, Sanctions: The Case of Rhodesia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1978), p. 164].

30  

Cited in Hans J.Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 10.

31  

Bruce W.Jentleson, Pipeline Politics: The Complex Political Economy of East-West Energy Trade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).

32  

While “my heart is completely with the iron and steel industry,” as West German Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder put it, “I must choose here between the interests of foreign policy and the interests of our economy” (Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, p. 118). See also Angela Stent, From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

33  

French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson spoke of a “progressive divorce” because “we no longer speak the same language.” West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt angrily pledged that “the pipeline will be built.” Even conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that “the question is whether one very powerful nation can prevent existing contracts from being fulfilled” (Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, p. 195).

34  

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, there were major differences over whether to reduce the scope of export controls through the NATO-like COCOM. In August 1954 for the first time since its inception, COCOM cut its embargo lists. It did so at European insistence and over American objections. The number of exports under total embargo was cut from 320 to 226 items, and the number under any form of COCOM control fell from 514 to 315. The most extensive decontrol was in general industrial equipment; the least extensive was of monitors and other items with direct military significance. Interests still coincided on military containment but not on economic containment. Indeed no less a figure than Winston Churchill was pushing for increased trade in response to the “peaceful coexistence” overtures of the post-Stalin Soviet leaders. “The more trade there is through the Iron Curtain,” Churchill argued, “the more the two great divisions of the world mingle in the healthy and fertile activities of commerce, the greater is the counterpoise to purely military calculations. Other thoughts take up their places in the minds of men.” Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, pp. 76–81, and Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: COCOM and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

35  

The UN Charter’s Article 2(7) has been the touchstone for this view: “Nothing con

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

   

tained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

36  

Martin, Coercive Cooperation.

37  

Strack, Sanctions: The Case of Rhodesia, pp. 86, 90; Losman, International Economic Sanctions, p. 102; R.B.Sutcliffe, “The Political Economy of Rhodesian Sanctions,” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies (July 1969).

38  

Kirshner, “Microfoundations of Economic Sanctions,” p. 52.

39  

Johan Galtung, “On the Effects of International Economic Sanctions, with Examples from the Case of Rhodesia,” World Politics, 19 (April 1967), p. 407.

40  

Kirshner’s “microfoundations” concept similarly seeks to get at the role of elites and “how groups within the target state are affected differentially” (Kirshner, “Microfoundations of Economic Sanctions,” p. 33).

41  

On the internal opposition effect, see Ivan Eland, “Economic Sanctions as Tools of Foreign Policy,” in Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding?, pp. 31–35, and Weiss et al., “Economic Sanctions and Their Humanitarian Impacts: An Overview” and “Toward a Framework for Analysis” in Political Gain and Civilian Pain, pp. 30, 42– 43.

42  

Eland, “Economic Sanctions as Tools of Foreign Policy,” p. 33, and Jennifer Davis, “Sanctions and Apartheid: The Economic Challenge to Discrimination,” pp. 173–184, in Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding?; also Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1995), p. 55.

43  

Daniel Drezner, “Allies, Adversaries and Economic Coercion: Russian Foreign Economic Policy Since 1991,” Security Studies, 6 (Spring 1997), pp. 65–111.

44  

Congressional Quarterly, 2963 Almanac, p. 328, cited in Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, p. 48.

45  

Bruce W.Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: W.W.Norton, 1994), chap. 2.

46  

Among those supporting this view are HSE, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered; Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions; and Rogers, “Using Sanctions to Control Regional Conflicts.”

47  

International Institute of Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey 1973 (London, 1973), pp. 1–2. Japan went so far as to publicly split with the United States, rejecting the basic principles of U.S. Middle East policy and coming out in favor of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories as a precondition to peace negotiations. During the Yom Kippur War, Britain embargoed arms and spare-parts sales to all belligerents, a policy that primarily hurt Israel. West Germany protested the American use of its ports for loading military cargo bound for Israel. Only Portugal allowed the United States to use its bases for the airlift. The European Economic Community foreign ministers issued a communiqué adopting a pro-Arab interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The Times of London labeled this policy “a surrender to Arab blackmail,” while OPEC cited it as a reason for canceling the additional oil production cutbacks scheduled for the following month. See also Hans Maull, “The Strategy of Avoidance: Europe’s Middle East Policies After the October War,” in J.C.Hurewitz, ed., Oil, the Arab-Israeli Dispute and the Industrial World (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1976), p. 118.

48  

Together Britain and France held a near monopoly over Italy’s oil supply. Yet in their effort to maintain nonadversarial relations with Mussolini to balance Hitler, according to A.J.P.Taylor they “inquired of Mussolini whether he would object to his oil being cut off. When he told them that he would, they successfully resisted oil sanctions.” Anthony Eden later would write in his diary, “Looking back the thought comes again, should we not have shown more determination in pressing through with sanctions in 1935, and if we had, would we not have called Mussolini’s bluff and at least postponed this [second world] war?

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

   

The answer, I am sure, is yes” [George W.Baer, “Sanctions and Security: The League of Nations and the Italian-Ethiopian War, 1935–36,” International Organization, 27 (Spring 1973)]; Frederick Hartmann, The Relations of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 369; A.J.P.Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (Hammondsworth, Great Britain: Penguin, 1965), p. 127.

49  

According to a “white establishment” figure, as quoted in Allister Sparks, “A New South Africa: The Role of Sanctions,” Washington Post, October 5, 1993, p. A19. The financial squeeze on South Africa was first ratcheted up by the decision by a private-sector actor, Chase Manhattan Bank, not to roll over short-term loans. But the Chase decision itself was shaped by the sanctions being imposed by the U.S. and other governments in that these sanctions were limiting South Africa’s capacity to earn enough hard currency to service its debt. See also Neta C.Crawford and Audie Klotz, eds., How Sanctions Work: Lessons from South Africa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

50  

Benjamin J.Cohen, In Whose Interest? International Banking and American Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); see also Cars well, Foreign Affairs (1980– 81), p. 251.

51  

John Stremlau, Sharpening International Sanctions: Toward a Stronger Role for the United Nations (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1996), pp. 57–58.

52  

U.S. Department of Defense, Soviet Acquisition of Western Technology (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), and Soviet Acquisition of Western Technology: An Update (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985).

53  

Jentleson, With Friends Like These; Kenneth R.Timmerman, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991); Alan Friedman, Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

54  

National Association of Manufacturers, A Catalog of New U.S. Unilateral Economic Sanctions for Foreign Policy Purposes, 1993–1996 (Washington, D.C.: NAM, 1997); President’s Export Council, “Unilateral Economic Sanctions: A Review of Existing Sanctions and Their Impacts on U.S. Economic Interests with Recommendations for Policy and Process Improvements,” June 1997 (mimeograph); Dianne E.Rennack and Robert D.Shuey, Congressional Research Service, Economic Sanctions to Achieve U.S. Foreign Policy Goals: Discussion and Guide to Current Law, CRS Report 97–949 F, updated June 5, 1998.

55  

“How to Choke Iraq,” New York Times, December 7, 1990, p. A18.

56  

Patrick Clawson, How Saddam Hussein Survived: Economic Sanctions, 1990–93 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1993); Paul Lewis, “Hussein Rebuilds Iraq’s Economy Undeterred by the U.S. Sanctions,” The New York Times, January 23, 1993, pp. 1, 14.

57  

Caryle Murphy, “In Iraq, Every Day Worse Than the Day Before,” Washington Post, July 24, 1994, p. A1; Michael Kelly, “Mob Town,” New York Times Magazine, February 14, 1993, p. 18; Paul Lewis “Iraq Reeling After 4 Years of Sanctions,” New York Times, July 29, 1994; “Data Base,” U.S. News and World Report, August 7, 1995.

58  

Eliyahu Kanovsky, “Iran’s Fragile Economy: Problems and Prospects,” PolicyWatch, #201, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 22, 1996; see also Elaine Sciolino, “Fear, Inflation and Graft Feed Disillusion Among Iranians,” New York Times, May 30, 1995, pp. A1, A8.

59  

Nora Boustany, “Economic Woes Strain Iran’s Islamic Government,” Washington Post, October 5, 1994, pp. A25, A26; Daniel Southerland, “2-Month-Old Trade Embargo Begins to Take Toll on Iran,” Washington Post, August 9, 1995, pp. F1, F2.

60  

Sonja Licht, “The Use of Sanctions in the Former Yugoslavia: Can They Assist in Conflict Resolution?,” in Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions, p. 156.

61  

Cited in Lopez et al., “Toward a Framework for Analysis,” in Political Gain and Civilian Pain, p. 45.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

62  

Facts on File, August 11, 1994, p. 561; Chris Hedges, “Isolated and Corrupt, Serbia’s Economy Stagnates,” New York Times, July 8, 1997, p. 10.

63  

Werleigh, “The Use of Sanctions in Haiti,” in Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding?, p. 169; Sarah Zaidi, “Humanitarian Effects of the Coup and Sanctions in Haiti,” in Weiss et al., Political Gain and Civilian Pain.

64  

Stremlau, Sharpening International Sanctions, p. 45.

65  

Eric Hoskins, “The Humanitarian Impact of Economic Sanctions and War in Iraq,” in Weiss et al., Political Gain and Civilian Pain’, Barbara Crossette, “UNICEF Head Says Thousands of Children Are Dying in Iraq,” New York Times, October 29, 1996, p. A8; UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “Special Report: FAO/WFP Food Supply and Nutrition Assessment to Iraq,” October 3, 1997, p. 1.

66  

Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, “UNSCOM Progress Report,” speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 29, 1997.

67  

Eric D.K.Melby, “Iraq,” in Richard N.Haass, ed., Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998), p. 120.

68  

See, for example, Con Coughlin, “Russian Weapons Experts Confirm Baghdad Connection,” Sunday Telegraph (London), February 21, 1999; Jamie Dettmer, “Russian Arms Sales to Iraq,” Washington Times, February 22, 1999, and “Russia Becomes Saddam’s Military Superstore,” Insight, March 15, 1999, all available electronically through IRAQ NEWS, sam11@erols.com.

69  

Between 1991 and 1995 planned annual arms imports were set at $2 billion per year, but actual figures were only $1.3 billion. The numbers for arms sales agreements as announced compared to actual acquisitions were as follows: 1,000 to 1,500 tanks but only 184 actually acquired; 100 to 200 aircraft versus 57; 200 to 300 artillery pieces versus 106 (Clawson, “Iran,” pp. 94–95, and Eisenstadt, Iranian Military Capabilities, pp. 36–37).

70  

Eisenstadt, Iranian Military Capabilities, pp. 90, 93.

71  

Susan L.Woodward, “The Use of Sanctions in Former Yugoslavia: Misunderstanding Political Realities,” and Sonja Licht, “The Use of Sanctions in the Former Yugoslavia: Can They Assist in Conflict Resolution?,” in Cortright and Lopez, Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding?, pp. 141–152, 153–160.

72  

David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 144.

73  

See sources in Stedman, “The Former Yugoslavia,” in Haass, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, p. 196, fn. 42.

74  

Rose, “Haiti,” in Haass, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, p. 61.

75  

Ibid., p. 63.

76  

Ibid., p. 81, note 33.

77  

Kimberly Ann Elliott and Gary Clyde Hufbauer,” ‘New’ Approaches to Economic Sanctions,” in Arnold Kanter and Linton F.Brooks, eds., U.S. Intervention Policy for the Post-Cold War World (New York: W.W.Norton, 1994), pp. 153–154.

78  

See, for example, Stephen P.Cohen, “Nuclear Breakout: How Should Washington Respond to the South Asian Bombs?,” Brooking Institution Policy Brief, June 11, 1998.

79  

Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, p. 78.

80  

Of 193 countries and territories included in Freedom House’s annual survey, 140 (72 percent) are ranked as either “free” or “partly free.” This includes 36 that are new democracies since 1989, with only eight backsliders in the same period (Freedom House, Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1997–98).

81  

Mercosur followed up by amending its charter to suspend any member country that “abandons the full exercise of republican institutions” [Strobe Talbott, “Democracy and the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 75 (November/December 1996), p. 54].

82  

Jim Golden, “Guatemala’s Counter-Coup: A Military About-Face,” New York Times,

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×

   

June 3, 1993, p. A3; see also Francisco Villagran de Leon, “Thwarting the Guatemala Coup,” Journal of Democracy, 4 (October 1993), pp. 115–124.

83  

Richard Feinberg, “The Coup That Wasn’t,” Washington Post, April 30, 1996, p. A13; see also Thomas W.Lippman, “Joint Effort Helps Head Off Coup Threat in Paraguay,” Washington Post, April 26, 1996, p. A30.

84  

Drew Christiansen, and Gerard F.Powers, “Economic Sanctions and the Just War Doctrine,” in Cortright and Lopez, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding?, pp. 101, 104.

85  

J.David Richardson and Karin Rindal, Why Exports Really Matter! (Washington, D.C.: Institute of International Economics, 1995), pp. 1, 7.

86  

Paul Blustein, “Thinking Globally, Punishing Locally,” Washington Post, May 16, 1997, pp. G1, G2.

87  

For a view on the constitutionality issues raised by state and local sanctions, see David Schmahmann and James Finch, “The Unconstitutionality of State and Local Enactments in the United States Restricting Business Ties with Burma (Myanmar),” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 30 (March 1997), pp. 175–207.

88  

See, for example, George E.Shambaugh, “Dominance, Dependence and Political Power: Tethering Technology in the 1980s and Today,” International Studies Quarterly, 40 (December 1996), pp. 559–588.

89  

Ibid., p. 40 passim.

90  

Christopher C.Joyner, “Collective Sanctions as Peaceful Coercion: Lessons from the United Nations Experience,” The Australian Year Book on International Law 1995, vol. 16, p. 257.

91  

National Association of Manufacturers, Catalog of New U.S. Unilateral Economic Sanctions; President’s Export Council, “Unilateral Economic Sanctions”; Mobil Oil Company, “Sanctions: Our Perspective,” New York Times, September 16, 1997.

92  

Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, World Politics: The Menu for Choice (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981), pp. 237–238.

93  

The National Association of Manufacturers report goes no further than conceding that sanctions “may be” used in “clearly defined cases of national or international emergency” and even then only if it can be demonstrated that success is likely and that other states and firms will cooperate; NAM, Catalog, p. iv.

94  

Mobil, “Sanctions: Our Perspective.”

95  

Crawford Young, “The Impossible Necessity of Nigeria: A Struggle for Nationhood” (review of Wole Soyinlea, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis), Foreign Affairs, 75 (November/December 1996), p. 143.

96  

Stremlau, Sharpening International Sanctions, p. 63.

97  

In this regard a project recently proposed by David Baldwin for constructing a new, more comprehensive and more systematic dataset on economic sanctions cases is of particular note (David A.Baldwin, “Evaluating Economic Sanctions,” August 1998 proposal currently under development).

98  

Jentleson, Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized.

Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 123
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 124
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 125
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 126
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 127
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 128
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 129
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 130
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 131
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 132
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 133
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 134
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 135
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 136
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 137
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 138
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 139
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 140
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 141
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 142
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 143
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 144
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 145
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 146
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 147
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 148
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 149
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 150
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 151
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 152
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 153
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 154
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 155
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 156
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 157
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 158
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 159
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 160
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 161
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 162
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 163
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 164
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 165
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 166
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 167
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 168
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 169
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 170
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 171
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 172
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 173
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 174
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 175
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 176
Suggested Citation:"Economic Sanctions and Post-Cold War Conflicts: Challenges for Theory and Policy." National Research Council. 2000. International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9897.
×
Page 177
Next: Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes »
International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War Get This Book
×
Buy Hardback | $77.95 Buy Ebook | $59.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

The end of the Cold War has changed the shape of organized violence in the world and the ways in which governments and others try to set its limits. Even the concept of international conflict is broadening to include ethnic conflicts and other kinds of violence within national borders that may affect international peace and security. What is not yet clear is whether or how these changes alter the way actors on the world scene should deal with conflict:

  • Do the old methods still work?
  • Are there new tools that could work better?
  • How do old and new methods relate to each other?

International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War critically examines evidence on the effectiveness of a dozen approaches to managing or resolving conflict in the world to develop insights for conflict resolution practitioners. It considers recent applications of familiar conflict management strategies, such as the use of threats of force, economic sanctions, and negotiation. It presents the first systematic assessments of the usefulness of some less familiar approaches to conflict resolution, including truth commissions, "engineered" electoral systems, autonomy arrangements, and regional organizations. It also opens up analysis of emerging issues, such as the dilemmas facing humanitarian organizations in complex emergencies. This book offers numerous practical insights and raises key questions for research on conflict resolution in a transforming world system.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!