Risa Brooks
September 2009
EVALUATING THE POLTICAL EFFECTS OF SANCTIONS INSTRUMENTS
Generally, the utility of targeted sanctions rests in their capacity to concentrate the costs
on individuals, entities or groups of economic measures, while limiting the collateral
harm experienced by a country’s population. There are manifest humanitarian and
political benefits to avoiding harming the general population when imposing sanctions.
Yet, targeting alone does not ensure that sanctions instruments will exert the necessary
pressure on an offending regime. We expect, or perhaps hope, that by freezing assets and
enforcing travel bans on “elites” that it will create incentives for them to make
concessions, or at least facilitate negotiation over issues in dispute. However, embedded
here is an assumption that those elites actually will wield influence within the policy
domain (and by implication that they will be responsive to the economic costs inflicted
on them, or to the costs imposed on the actors to whom they are accountable). For
example, we may see sanctions targeted to those entities or individuals associated with an
offending activity or policy (e.g., heads of financial institutions, scientists or corporate
chiefs of entities associated with a clandestine nuclear program); these are “elites,” but
they may not be the individuals actually in charge of making policy decisions about the
issue in dispute.
In short, often we come to the table with a coarse understanding of the way that economic
effects will translate into political effects within offending regimes: analysts may assume
that if we identify and then target elites, policy change will follow—an approach that
takes a great deal for granted about the nature and complexity of different states,
including who exercises authority and how decisions are made within them. Essential is a
more precise understanding of the domestic politics of the state subject to sanctions if we
are going to understand whether measures (both targeted and comprehensive) will
actually generate costs on the right actors in the regime, in a way that will produce
movement in policy positions for the state as a whole. In short, even those sanctions that
seem in principle to be quite narrow and targeted in their economic consequences might
be ineffective if formal institutions or informal coalitions within the regime mean that
those affected by the measures lack political influence over the outcomes in question.
I.
Translating economic effects into political effects
Specifically, crucial to anticipating the political effects of economic and other sanctions
are two factors. First is understanding the distributional or welfare implications of the
sanctions instrument: who is harmed by what measure? In table 1 I outline some
potential distributional consequences of different sanctions. Central is understanding the
effects of sanctions not only in terms of the harm they generate for an economy at large
or even the costs they create for targeted individuals/entities, but in terms of their
(re)distributional implications.1 That is, like many protectionist trade measures or other
types of restrictions on economic, social and cultural exchange, there are usually winners
and losers from every measure imposed. The same instrument can have very different
implications, depending on the constituency in question: that is sanctions that harm the
macro-economy, and therefore the mass population, can benefit import competitive
industries, (inefficient) state-owned enterprises, or those with ties to the security
apparatus and the state that run smuggling networks and black market enterprises. In
short, we need to ask not only who loses as a result of the imposition of a particular
sanction, but who wins as well.
Second, understanding the effects of sanctions requires knowing how economic harm
translates into political influence within the system. That is, those harmed, and therefore
those with an incentive to take action to alleviate the harm, must actually have influence,
either directly or indirectly, within the policy domain in question. Knowing who
exercises such influence requires, in each case, analyzing the political system and
knowing:
(1) Who within the state has the capacity to influence policy?
(2) How do the sanctions imposed affect that group or individual’s incentives to act?
Because the welfare effects of sanctions are diverse and the very same instrument can
generate costs and benefits for different constituencies, we have to know who matters in
the political system, if we are anticipate the political effects of sanctions instruments. We
need to know if sanctions actually create incentives for those with political influence to
change policy. Specifically, sanctions might lack political effectiveness if: (a) the
sanctions actually have minimal costs or create welfare benefits for the targeted
constituency (whether that be masses, or smaller groups/individuals);2 (b) the targeted
entity does not have any significant political influence that could translate into a change
in policy.
II. Who has influence? A starting point for analysis.
Below I provide a starting point for analyzing who has influence in different political
systems; the goal is to help identify the appropriate political “pressure points” in a
regime. Although we can develop general frameworks, each system must be analyzed on
its own terms. In addition, who has influence is not static; coalitions and intra-regime
cleavages can be fluid and change over time.
Table 1 (appended) appears in Risa Brooks, “Sanctions and Regime Type: What Works, and When?”
Security Studies no. 4 (2002).
2
This could be due to the actual economic effects outlined in table one. Or as many have observed, it could
be due to the complexity and practical difficulty of implementing the instrument, or the political challenges,
posed by porous border, a lack of enforcement, or unwillingness of other key countries or actors to
participate in the sanctions regime.
1
(a) Formal institutions
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What are the formal institutions governing policy decisions and do institutions
actually operate in conformity with those rules?
Who enjoys political power and over what domains do they enjoy power? Is
influence in one domain fungible to other domains?
To whom are those with political influence accountable?
(b) Coalitions, cleavages and factions.
In addition to assessing formal institutions, we need to look at the constellation of
interests and the balance of power among different constituencies within a regime.
Factions and coalitions can neutralize institutional features or constraints in a state (for
example, if individuals or groups within different decision-making entities all agree);
generate cleavages that are different from those we might draw from looking at
institutions; or create coalitions that interact with institutions in intriguing patterns.
Specifically:
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What are the axes of preference divergence or convergence of actors within the
state (e.g., what is the range and intensity of political preferences or viewpoints
over different issues)?
Do these axes translate into coherent factions that endure over time, or are
coalitions shifting and fluid?
What is the balance of power among these factions and how do they relate to the
formal institutions of the state?
To whom are those factions accountable within the country? That is, what are
their societal bases or constituencies within the state, or beyond?
The last issue—to whom leaders or factions are accountable—is especially important in
understanding the informal political logic that may allow sanctions to work. Take, for
example, sanctions that prohibit arms imports. They may be harmful to the country’s
armed forces’ organizational interests because they create shortages in spare parts and a
lack of access to new technology (although they could also be beneficial if they spur
investment in an indigenous arms industry, or neutral if other supplies are available). If
the leader or coalition in charge of the country depends heavily on, or has allied with, the
military (or is from the military), the ban on imports could be much more politically
consequential, than if the empowered faction is accountable to some other social or
economic constituency.
In short, knowing how authority is exercised in the regime is essential to anticipating how
sanctions’ distributional effects will translate into political effects within a regime.