Thomas Biersteker, The Graduate Institute, Geneva
Entry prepared for the Oxford Companion to International Relations
Sanctions in international relations are restrictive economic measures imposed by a state, a group of states, or the UN Security Council to persuade a target to change its behavior, to constrain it from engaging in some proscribed activities, and/or to send a signal about violations of international norms.
Sanctions vary enormously in terms of their sources, targets, purposes, types, scope, impacts, and effectiveness as policy instruments. Some states, particularly the United States, make frequent use of unilateral sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Others impose sanctions only when authorized by regional organizations such as the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Organization of American States (OAS), or sub-regional organizations like the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the principal body tasked with authorizing mandatory global sanctions in situations it deems a threat to international peace and security. Since the end of the Cold War, the UN Security
Council has increased the frequency of its use of sanctions, imposing them 23 different times, an average of one per year since 1990. During the Cold War, the UN imposed only two sanctions regimes (against Rhodesia and South Africa). Any one of these state or inter-governmental entities can be legal sources of sanctions. Sanctions are often imposed simultaneously by more than one source, and it is often difficult to separate out their independent effects, something described below in the discussion of the impacts and effectiveness of sanctions.
The targets of sanctions also vary considerably. When sanctions were first being discussed as an instrument of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson considered them the functional equivalent of war, a complete embargo to be imposed on an entire country or territory, as a way of imposing severe burdens on a population, without placing one’s military forces at risk. Comprehensive sanctions (discussed in more detail below) target an entire country and its population in an indiscriminate manner. Targeted sanctions differ both in logic and design and typically discriminate between the general population and those responsible for the proscribed activities.
Sanctions can be targeted against a government, its leadership, its key financial and political backers, a non-state actor or armed group, a group accused of engaging in the commitment of terrorist activities, to all parties of a conflict, or to a neighboring state (in what are termed
“secondary sanctions”).
Most of the policy discourse, popular discussion, and scholarly literature focus on the purpose of sanctions in terms of their ability to change the behavior of the target(s), but sanctions tend to be imposed for a variety of different purposes (Giumelli 2011). While coercing a change in behavior is almost always one of the central purposes of sanctions, there are some instances in which it is highly unlikely that a target will give in to external pressure (for example, when it means going into exile, to a trial in the Hague, or when its goals include replacing the existing international order in its entirety). In such circumstances, sanctions may be imposed to constrain
1

a target from continuing to engage in proscribed activities, to raise the costs for the target, to force a change of strategy, or simply to buy time for negotiations or a change of regime. Virtually all sanctions also send signals, not only to the target, but often simultaneously to other actors as well. UN sanctions on Iran and North Korea send signals both to the target countries, but also to other countries that might be contemplating the development of a nuclear weapons capability.
Signals vary in the degree of their focus and clarity, and can sometimes stigmatize both a target and its behavior. In this sense, sanctions play an important role in the enforcement of norms at the international level. It is important to broaden the assessment of sanctions beyond their ability to coerce a change in target behavior, something that partially addresses one aspect of the so-called
“sanctions paradox” about why measures with a low probability of success are used with such frequency (Drezner 1999).
There are two principal types of sanctions: comprehensive and targeted. Comprehensive sanctions are the broadest in scope, and do not discriminate between those responsible for the proscribed activities and the general population of a country. Targeted sanctions were first introduced in the early 1990s and are designed deliberately to be different from comprehensive sanctions. By focusing measures on leaders, decision-makers, and their principal supporters, rather than on the general population or by targeting a single sector, rather than an entire economy, targeted sanctions can lessen the negative humanitarian impacts on innocent civilian populations. They are more adaptable than comprehensive sanctions and can be calibrated to influence targets with a logic that differs from comprehensive sanctions. If a target responds positively, the sanctions can be eased, suspended, or lifted. If the target demonstrates intransigence or increases proscribed activity, the measures can be extended incrementally to other members of a governing body, to its key supporters, or to egregious violators of the sanctions. It is useful to think about the application of targeted sanctions in terms of a general form of bargaining underway between senders and targets.
The use of targeted sanctions increased considerably after the unacceptably high humanitarian costs of the comprehensive sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s (Weiss et. al 1997, Gordon 2010), and today all UN sanctions are targeted. Although targeted sanctions are intended to minimize unintended consequences for innocent civilian populations, they vary in their scope and degree of discrimination between targets and the general population. Sanctions targeted against a small number of individuals or firms are the most targeted of targeted sanctions. Sectoral or commodity sanctions tend to be somewhat less targeted than individual sanctions, since nearly every economic sector is related to other sectors of an economy. Sectoral sanctions directed against core economic activities such as oil imports or the financial sector tend to be the least discriminating, since they are sectors used directly, or indirectly, by an entire population.
Technically speaking, they are not comprehensive sanctions, but with their lack of discrimination among members of a population, they begin to approximate comprehensive measures in important respects. The oil and financial sector sanctions imposed on Iran in 2012 by the EU, taken in combination with the pre-existing, quasi-comprehensive US unilateral sanctions, are increasingly comprehensive in their scope. By contrast, the UN targeted sanctions against Iran remain relatively targeted against individuals and firms engaged in activities with the potential to provide its nuclear program with a weapons capability.
Because they are always used in combinations with other policy instruments – active high level diplomacy, formal negotiations, referrals to legal tribunals, threats of force, the use of force,
2

and/or covert activities – it is often extremely difficult to separate out the independent impacts of sanctions. The most effective way is to employ an interrupted time series analysis of changes in the flows of goods and finance to the targets of sanctions. This is often very difficult, however, because targeted entities tend to be notoriously unreliable in their statistical reporting and have strong incentives either to deny or exaggerate the impacts of sanctions.
Precisely how sanctions are intended to work is not always well articulated by policy practitioners or in the scholarly literature. With regard to coercing a change in behavior, the impositions of sanctions should theoretically affect the cost/benefit calculations of the target, either to persuade it to change its proscribed behavior or to face the wrath of a mobilized public, calling for a change in policy or an overthrow of the regime. This is what Johan Galtung termed
“the naïve theory of sanctions” in his 1967 assessment of sanctions against Rhodesia which he argued would be resisted because of the adaptive nature of economies and the powerful economic incentives to evade produced by the imposition of sanctions (Galtung 1967).
The effectiveness of sanctions is typically assessed as a function of a policy outcome and some estimate of the sanctions contribution to that outcome. The latter is especially difficult to measure, since it implicitly requires a counterfactual assessment of what would have happened in the absence of sanctions. It is made more difficult by the challenges of isolating the independent impacts of sanctions, as just discussed. A great deal of the literature on the effectiveness of sanctions is case specific, time delineated, and anecdotal. The assessment of ongoing sanctions is always provisional, based on the moment in time of the evaluation. The quantitative empirical literature on sanctions also combines an assessment of policy outcome and sanctions contribution. Most large-N empirical studies of sanctions group different types of sanctions
(unilateral, multilateral regional and global) into aggregate data bases and conclude that they are effective about one-third of the time (Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott, and Oegg 2007; Morgan et. al
2008). A more recent survey of the effectiveness of UN targeted sanctions only has concluded that sanctions are effective in the aggregate only 22% of the time (Biersteker et. al, 2013). The research on UN targeted sanctions distinguishes between the different purposes of sanctions (to coerce, constrain, and signal, as discussed above) and finds that efforts to constrain and signal are almost three times as effective as efforts to coerce, which succeed only 10% of the time. There are theoretical reasons to believe that the threat of sanctions might be more effective in coercing a change in behavior than the actual imposition of the measures, as has been argued in some of the formal theory work on the subject (Hovi, Husby and Sprinz, 2005).
All implemented policy measures have both intended and unintended consequences. Sanctions tend to leave legacies of criminality (Andreas 2005), a strengthening of authoritarian rule, and an increase in human rights violations in the targeted countries. In some instances, the externalities can be more positive, however, particularly when the measures increase the capacity of states to monitor suspicious financial transactions (Biersteker 2010).
Despite their limited effectiveness in coercing changes in behavior, sanctions are likely to remain an important instrument of contemporary global governance. When applied in combination with other policy measures (negotiations, legal referrals, threats and use of force) they can constrain actors from engaging in proscribed activities and if properly designed and communicated, can be a highly effective way to enforce international norms.
3

Bibliography
Andreas, Peter, 2005, Criminalizing Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and its
Legacy. International Studies Quarterly , vol. 49, no. 2.
Biersteker, Thomas, 2010, “Unintended consequences of measures to counter the financing of terrorism” in Christopher Daase and Cornelius Friesendorf (eds.) Rethinking
Security Governance: The Problem of Unintended Consequences , New York, Routledge
Publishers.
Biersteker, Thomas, Sue Eckert, Zuzana Hudakova and Marcos Touinho, 2013,
SanctionsApp, Computer software, Apple App Store.
Drezner, Daniel W., 1999, The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International
Relations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Galtung, Johan, 1967, “On the Effects of International Economic Sanctions: With
Examples from the Case of Rhodesia” World Politics , vol. 19, no. 3.
Giumelli, Francesco, 2011, Coercing, Constraining, and Signalling: Explaining UN and
EU Sanctions after the Cold War , Colchester, ECPR Press.
Gordon, Joy, 2010, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions , Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.
Hovi, Jon, Robert Huseby, and Detlof Sprinz, 2005, “When Do (Imposed) Economic
Sanctions Work?” World Politics , vol. 57, no. 4.
Hufbauer, Gary, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly Elliott, and Barbara Oegg, 2007, Economic
Sanctions Reconsidered , 3 rd
Edition, Washington, Peterson Institute for International
Economics.
Morgan, Clifton, Navin Bapat, and Valentina Krustev, 2008, “The Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions, 1971-2000” Conflict Management and Peace Science , vol. 28, no. 1.
Weiss, Thomas G., David Cortright, George A. Lopez, and Larry Minear, 1997, Political
Gain and Civilian Pain, Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
4