User:Droste1977/sandbox/economic sanctions

By now there is a voluminous literature on the consequences of economic sanctions, including their likely success or failure. In a widely cited article published in 1997 Robert Pape claimed that economic sanctions rarely work. The primary target of his claim was a classic study by Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott and Kimberley Elliott which subsequently has been updated and is now in its third edition. In it the authors shoot back arguing that “the bald statement ‘sanctions never work’ is demonstrably wrong”. It is safe, if obviously bland, to say that sanctions sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. The important issue is when either is likely to be the case.

The sanctions literature has identified a number of factors which are important and which center around the goals of sanctions, the nature of the targets, and the availability of countermeasures. As Jentleson argues, there is a broad consensus in the literature that success varies depending on which goals are pursued. Sanctions in pursuit of limited policy objectives are more likely to be successful than sanctions which aim to achieve more ambitious goals, such as bringing about regime change.

Regime type and the prior relationship between sender and target countries is significant as well. By and large democracies appear to be more vulnerable to sanctions than autocracies, but it is important not to overstate this point as it may be difficult to disentangle the effects of regime type and other factors, and it is not the case that autocracies are invulnerable. Along related lines Peksen and Jeong showed a strong connection between the effectiveness of sanctions and the size of veto players in a government. Veto players represent individual or collective actors whose agreement is required for a change of the status quo, for example, parties in a coalition, or the legislature's check on presidential powers. When sanctions are imposed on a country, it can try to mitigate them by adjusting its economic policy. The size of the veto players determines how many constraints the government will face when trying to change status quo policies, and the larger the size of the veto players, the more difficult it is to find support for new policies, thus making the sanctions more effective. Drezner has found that sanctions are more likely to be effective if imposed on allies than adversaries.

Simple common sense suggests that economic sanctions which impose punishing economic costs on the target state will more likely succeed than sanctions which do not amount to more than a minor inconvenience. Yet, even harsh economic sanctions have been known to fail, and harsh economic sanctions may impose such high costs on innocent third parties, such as Iraqi children during the sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s, that they have been seen as ethically dubious. Finally, the type of sanctions or the specifics of a particular sanctions regime makes a difference. Here we can distinguish between comprehensive versus targeted sanctions, trade and financial sanctions, sanctions imposed multilaterally, such as UN sanctions, or unilateral sanctions.

Offering an explanation as to why sanctions are still imposed even when they may be marginally effective, British diplomat Jeremy Greenstock suggests sanctions are popular not because they are known to be effective, but because "there is nothing else [to do] between words and military action if you want to bring pressure upon a government". Critics of sanctions like Belgian jurist Marc Bossuyt argue that in nondemocratic regimes, the extent to which this affects political outcomes is contested, because by definition such regimes do not respond as strongly to the popular will.