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I affirm
Accept reasonable aff interpretations to offset the 7-4, 6-3 time skew by allowing the aff framework to
hold up after the negative reads their case, making it so my strategic investment in the 1AC is not moot
once the neg talks.
Economic sanctions exclude targeted sanctions, trade wars, and economic warfare- Normand and
Wilcke 01Roger Normand & Christoph Wilcke. Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems Fall, 2001 Norm Human Rights, Sanctions,
and Terrorist Threats: The United Nations Sanctions Against Iraq. (Wilcke completed his degree of Master of Philosophy at the
University of Oxford in Modern Middle Eastern Studies in the summer of 2001. Roger Normand is co-founder and Executive
Director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), a human rights group that advocates against poverty and
economic injustice both at home and abroad.)
First, sanctions should be distinguished from trade wars, in which the price for exchanged
goods is raised or lowered, and from economic warfare, where the entire economy or particular
economic sectors are targeted for destruction by the military (or by sanctions) in order to achieve
military aims. n7 Sanctions themselves need to be further categorized into economic (indirect)
and targeted (direct) sanctions. Indirect sanctions aim to debilitate the entire economy of a country to
achieve the compliance of that country's leadership with certain foreign policy goals formulated by the
countries imposing sanctions. n8 Targeted sanctions, like the indiscriminate indirect sanctions, aim to
influence a country's political leadership by debilitating that political leadership through foreign
travel bans or by freezing its foreign assets. Sanctions can be comprehensive, including the entire
foreign trade and financial exchange of a country, or selective, prohibiting the import or export only of
certain goods, such as in arms embargoes.
Use is defined as “to deploy” by Oxford American dictionary. This means that in the short term the
affirmative can still threaten sanctions with empirical legitimacy, since they’re not proactively
deploying them.
The value is morality since ought expresses a moral imperative. Kant 1 explains:
Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. 1785. www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/kantgw.pdf
All imperatives are expressed with an ‘ought’, which indicates how an objective law of reason relates
to a will that it constrains. An imperative says that it would be good to do or to refrain from
doing something, but it addresses this to a will that doesn’t always do x just because x is
represented to it as good to do. Practical good is what determines the will by means of the
thoughts that reason produces—and thus not by subjective causes but objectively, on grounds
that are valid for every rational being just because it is rational. This contrasts with the thought
that it would be nice to act in a certain way; the latter influences the will only by means of a
feeling that has purely subjective causes, which hold for the senses of this or that person but
not as a principle of reason that holds for everyone.4
The only objective conception and basis for morality is rationality. Any derivative of that rationality is
only secondary to the value of rationality itself. Kant 2 explains:
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So if there is to be a supreme practical principle, and a categorical imperative for the human will, it
must be an objective principle of the will that can serve as a universal law. Why must it? Because
it has to be drawn from the conception of something that is an end in itself and therefore an
end for everyone. The basis for this principle is: rational nature exists as an end in itself. Human
beings necessarily think of their own existence in this way, which means that the principle
holds as a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being also thinks of
his existence on the same rational ground that holds also for myself;11 and so it is at the same
time an objective principle—·one that doesn’t depend on contingent facts about this or that
subject ·—a supreme practical ground from which it must be possible to derive all the laws of
the will. So here is the practical imperative: Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your
own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.
Hence the standard is maintenance of rationality.
My first contention is that economic sanctions use people as a means to an end- Economic sanctions
violate the categorical imperative and impose massive harm on innocents. Addis 03Adeno Addis. Economic Sanctions and the Problem of Evil. Human Rights Quarterly 25 (2003).
Economic sanctions deprive citizens of the target state many of the basic necessities of life,
leading to massive disruption and even destruction of life. The often high cost in life, liberty, and
property that economic sanctions exact on innocent citizens and sectors of the target state are,
to these critics, simply unacceptable even if at the end there was to be a change in the action and
behavior of the regime of the target state. The moral and material costs that sanctions entail are, to these critics,
simply too high to bear. Actually, there are two versions of the moral argument. The weak version is utilitarian in nature. It claims that
often the cost in innocent human life and infrastructural damage is far greater than the benefit that is gained by imposing these
sanctions.13 The strong version of the moral argument is Kantian in its outlook. It objects to economic sanctions on the ground that
often, if not always, sanctions target innocent civilians for suffering as a means to achieving a foreign
policy objective, contrary to Kant’s categorical imperative that we treat “humanity, whether in
[our] person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time
as an end.”
My second contention is that economic sanctions hurt the domestic economy. Hadar 98Leon T. Hadar -adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute and a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers international politics
and economics with a special interest in East Asia and the Middle East. March 26, 1998 Trade Policy Analysis No. 1 U.S.
SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA A Failure on All Fronts CENTER FOR TRADE POLICY STUDIES
http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html
Unilateral economic sanctions have become a staple of U.S. foreign policy. According to a study issued by the National
Association of Manufacturers, from 1993 through 1996 the United States promulgated 61 laws and executive actions to
impose unilateral economic sanctions for foreign policy purposes. More than 35 countries have been targeted, including important
trade partners such as Canada, Mexico, and Italy. Cambodia and Sudan joined the list in 1997. The NAM study found that the
sanctioned countries represented 2.3 billion potential consumers of U.S. goods and services, or 42 percent of the
world population, and $790 billion worth of export markets, 19 percent of the world's total. It
stated that "the economic implications of the unilateral actions have been seriously
underestimated" since the above figures did not take into consideration all the countries
affected by "secondary boycott" measures, which apply U.S. law to foreign companies doing
business in a targeted country. And the study did not calculate the effects of sanctions that have been adopted at the
state and local level.(3) Another study found that since 1993 Washington, states, and localities combined have slapped 142 unilateral
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sanctions on 41 countries.(4) And according to the U.S. Council on Competitiveness,
U.S. export sales and 120,000 jobs were put at risk by U.S. unilateral actions.
2010
more than $6 billion in
My Third contention is that economic sanctions are rarely effective and are often counterproductive- O’Quinn
97/Robert O’Quinn 1997 (Senior Economist at Joint Economic Committee) “A User's Guide To Economic Sanctions” Heritage Foundation pg. Online/
Unilateral economic sanctions are not likely to place a sufficiently large financial burden on a
target country's economy to persuade its government to change objectionable policies. There
are very few industries in the United States that dominate the global market and are
unchallenged by foreign rivals. Even for such sophisticated products as commercial satellites
and supercomputers, the reality of foreign competition undermines the effectiveness of
unilateral export restrictions. When the United States imposes a unilateral export embargo, foreign
suppliers can replace the American companies with minimal damage to the target country's economy.
AND Multilateral sanctions are counterproductive- International organizations are much more likely to be
steadfast on a norm. Drezner 00-
Drezner, Daniel. Bargaining, Enforcement, and Multilateral Sanctions: When Is Cooperation Counterproductive? International Organization. January 01, 2000
This problem of inflexible demands and prolonged stalemates should be particularly acute when the primary
sender uses an international organization as a mechanism for gaining cooperation. Although norms and
principles may exist without an institutional reference, they are more likely to be embedded
within international organizations; indeed, international organizations are often created with
the expressed purpose of promoting specific norms. A norm powerful enough to attract the
support of an international organization should also be more difficult to compromise. It would
call into question the integrity of the international organization and its founding ideas. Thus all
of the bargaining problems associated with using norms are likely to be exacerbated when an
international organization is enlisted to promote multilateral cooperation
My fourth contention is that economic sanctions bolster regimesEconomic Sanctions divert the cost of sanctions onto innocents, strengthening authoritarian power- Peksen 09
Dursun Pesken (PhD in Political Science, Assistant Professor), 2009. Better or Worse? The Effect of Economic Sanctions on Human Rights. Journal of Peace
Research. 46; 59. http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/46/1/59
First, economic coercion enhances the repressive capacity of the regime allowing political elites
to escape the cost of economic pressure and improving the ties between the political leadership
and its constituency. Because the target leadership controls the supply of scarce public
resources (typically made more scarce by the sanctions), political elites will divert the cost of
sanctions to average citizens by unevenly using extant resources in their favor (Weiss et al.,
1997; Weiss, 1999; Rowe, 2000; Cortright, Millar & Lopez, 2001). Political elites also avoid the cost of
sanctions by generating revenues and securing the supplies of scarce resources through illegal
smuggling and other underground transnational economic channels (Andreas, 2005; Selden, 1999:
75–76; Gibbons, 1999). Hence, the targeted elites likely remain unharmed by coercion, as
economic sanctions disproportionately affect average citizens. Furthermore, sanctions
strengthen the authoritarian regime’s ties with prominent social groups because those groups
are dependent on the regime’s control over the distribution of scarce resources (Gibbons, 1999;
Reuther, 1995).
AND Economic sanctions increase human rights abuses across the board- Peksen 08 explains
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Peksen, Dursun. Drury, Cooper. August, 2008. [ Department of Political Science, East Carolina University. Department of Political Science
University of Missouri.] “Economic Sanctions and Democracy.”2008 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. SSRN.
Based on the research findings of this study, it is evident that the use of ‘sticks’, at least in the form of economic coercion
as a foreign policy tool, does not contribute to the advancement of human rights. Utilizing a time series, cross-national
empirical analysis for the period 1981–2000, the article demonstrates that economic sanctions deteriorate citizens’ physical
integrity rights. …The results also point out that extensive sanctions, including comprehensive trade and financial restrictions,
appear to be more detrimental to human rights than partial/selective sanctions. Economic coercion is still a detrimental and
counterproductive policy tool, even when sanctions are imposed with the specific goal of promoting human rights
conditions. Furthermore, multilateral sanctions have a greater overall negative impact on human rights than unilateral sanctions.
Finally, besides the immediate effect of ongoing sanctions, the findings on the duration of economic sanctions (number of years
sanctions are in place) suggest that the longer sanctions are imposed, the greater accumulating human rights cost they will inflict on
target countries…In terms of sanction objectives, it appears that human rights sanctions increase the likelihood of violations
of integrity rights abuses more than non-human-rights sanctions. For instance, in the case of disappearances, human rights
sanctions lead to 151% and 62% more likely integrity rights abuses under extensive and partial sanctions, respectively.
Peksen 3 explains why the statistical mechanisms used in this study produce the most accurate results
in comparison to other studies:
None of these studies*, [including Galtung, Hafbauer Schott & Elliot, Pape, Weiss,
Cortright and Lopez, Marinov, Allen, or Li and Drury) however, provides a cross-national,
empirical examination of the extent to which economic sanctions affect government
respect for human rights practices in target countries. Therefore, we are still far from
understanding the effect economic sanctions have on human rights. Starting with a theoretical
framework next, this study provides a thorough examination of the unintended effect
sanctions have on human rights.
Finally, tyranny is the biggest source of human rights abuses. Bassiouni1 96
Since World War II, the number of conflicts of an international character declined as did their harmful impact, in comparison
to other types of conflicts whose harmful consequences increased. Indeed, the occurrence of conflicts of a noninternational character and purely internal conflicts has dramatically increased in number, intensity, and
victimization. In addition, tyrannical regimes produced systematic and large scale-victimization far exceeding
quantitatively and qualitatively the harmful results generated by all other types of conflicts. Conflicts of a noninternational character, purely internal conflicts, and tyrannical regime victimization have occurred all over the world. That
victimization has included genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, along with, inter alia, extra-judicial
executions, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention, all of which constitute serious violations of fundamental human rights
protected by international human rights law.3 During the course of the twentieth century it is estimated that conflicts of
a non-international character, internal conflicts, and tyrannical regime victimization have resulted in more than 170
million deaths. This is compared with an estimated 33 million military casualties.5 It is estimated that since World War II,
more than 250 conflicts of a non-international character, internal conflicts, and tyrannical regime victimization have occurred.
These situations have resulted in an estimated 86 million casualties.
My fifth contention is that constructive engagement is effective-
A policy of constructive engagement is key to developing human rights and promoting democracy.
Forcese 02-
/Craig Forcese of the University of Otttawa in and associate at Huges, Hubbard, & Reed LLP, "Globalizing Decency: Responsible Engagement in an
Era of Economic Integration" 2002, 5 Yale H.R. & Dev. L.J. 1, pg LN, pwneill/
1
/Cherif Bassiouni 1996 (Distinguished research law prof emeritus at Depaul Univ) “Searching for Peace and Achieving Justice: The Need
for Accountability” Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 59, No. 4, pg. Jstor, pwneill/
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For at least some of its proponents, the justification for the latter, economic element of "constructive engagement" reflects a
variant of "modernization" or "trickle-down" development theory. Trade with, and investment in, repressive countries, it is
urged, will promote political liberalization and greater respect for human rights by exposing populations to liberal,
human rights-supporting values and fostering the economic growth viewed as a pre-requisite to democratization.
Thus, with respect to China, business leaders have asserted, "the web of contacts between Chinese citizens and U.S.
investors that develops in the course of business relationships promotes the transfer of liberal democratic values from this
side of the Pacific to the East." n9 Contact with transnational businesses is also viewed as "promoting greater
integration of the host country in the international community, thereby enlarging its exposure to the shared values
of civilized nations." Companies, it is urged, “can serve U.S. strategic, political, and economic interests by their enormous
contributions to the development of emerging markets... [and] have a positive impact on: (1) basic infrastructure, such
as schools, roads, electrification, and medical facilities; (2) the creation of a stable middle class that is often the first
step toward attaining accountable government; (3) improved labor conditions and rights; and (4) protection of the
environment.”
Additionally, opening markets and providing incentives are a preferable alternative to Economic Sanctions.
Cortright 97:
The price of peace: incentives and international conflict prevention
David Cortright, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Perhaps the greatest difference between sanctions and incentives lies in their impact on human behavior. Drawing
on the insights of behavioral psychology, Baldwin identified key distinctions between the two approaches. Incentives foster
cooperation and goodwill, whereas sanctions create hostility and separation. Threats tend to generate reactions of
fear, anxiety, and resistance, whereas the normal responses to a promise or reward are hope, reassurance, and attraction.
Threats send a message of "indifference or active hostility," according to Baldwin, whereas promises "convey an
impression of sympathy and concern." Incentives tend to enhance the recipient's willingness to cooperate with the
sender, whereas negative measures may impede such cooperation. Roger Fisher argued that "imposing pain may not
be a good way to produce a desired decision" or to influence another's actions. Whereas threats and punishment
generate resistance, promises and rewards tend to foster cooperation. [1997, chapter 1]
Finally, free trade is the global economic safeguard against human rights abuses. Griswold2 04Trade policy has implications beyond economic growth and living standards. It can directly and indirectly influence a
nation’s political development by decentralizing power and influence, by spreading technology, information, and
ideas in a society, and by raising incomes and creating a larger middle class. Theory and evidence together argue that
trade liberalization and a more general openness to the global economy do correlate with more political and civil
freedom, in the world as a whole and within individual countries. When debating trade policy, members of Congress cannot
ignore the broader foreign policy implications of trade. By opening our markets at home and encouraging freer trade
abroad, the United States promotes not only economic growth but a more humane and democratic world. Free
trade and globalization do not guarantee democracy and respect for human rights, but they do provide a more favorable
trade wind for achieving those goals. Members of Congress who consistently vote against more open markets at home and market-opening trade agreements with
other nations are in effect voting to keep millions of people locked within the walls of tyranny, and millions more trapped in a partly free netherworld of halfrights, half-freedoms, and halfdemocracy.
2
Daniel T. Griswold, Associate Director, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute, “Trading Tyranny for Freedom: How Open Markets Till
the Soil for Democracy,” CATO TRADE POLICY ANALYSIS n. 26, January 4, 2004.
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