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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 11/02
The Politics of Sanctions
Simon Chesterman and Béatrice Pouligny
May 2002
Executive Summary
Do sanctions work? The jury remains out on this question, but two preliminary issues bear further examination also. What are sanctions intended to achieve? And do states actually want sanctions to work? These essentially political questions depend on two discrete dynamics that are the subject of this report, which focuses on sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. The first is the political context of the Council and how the intentions of key actors are channelled into sanctions regimes. The second is the political economy in which those sanctions operate.
Before 1990, the Security Council had imposed mandatory sanctions only twice. Since 1990, sanctions have been imposed on over a dozen countries, for purposes ranging from reversing territorial aggression to restoring democratically elected leaders. But the sharp increase in the recourse to sanctions has had less to do with agreement on their effectiveness than with the more general consensus among Council members in the post-cold war era.
Since 1994, there has been a general trend towards more targeted sanctions. It is not clear, however, whether this is due to a view that they work as or more effectively than general economic sanctions, or simply to concerns about the humanitarian impact of sanctions when there is no certainty that they work at all.
