Notes on the sociology of targeted sanctions
David Sylvan
IHEID
1. This memorandum sketches out arguments on three related issues pertaining to the effects and
effectiveness of UN targeted sanctions. First, it proposes a sociological conception of such
sanctions, different from the standard psychological or economic conceptions. Second, it puts
forward elements of a theory as to how sanctions and sanctioned behaviors interact. Third, it
presents design criteria for studying putative instances of targeted sanctions’ effects and
effectiveness.
2. The standard approach to sanctions conceptualizes the target as having decided to engage in a
particular behavior, being sanctioned by various means (e.g., trade embargoes or asset freezes), and,
depending on the degree of pain or of normative unease, deciding to continue or, alternatively, to
end the behavior in question. This approach focuses on the decision process of the target; although
the sanctions in fact come from some one or more actors (a state, an international organization, a
group of citizens), its actions are considered as tantamount to the target’s environment, so that the
target is in effect playing a game against nature. Even Crawford and Klotz, who have in many ways
broken from the standard paradigm, conceive of sanctions as potentially working by “decision
makers ... understand[ing] and be[ing] persuaded” (1999: 28-9); the focus is on the thought process
of the target. (I’m here abstracting from other potential goals of sanctions, such as punishment and
deterrence of similar sanctioned acts by others in the future.)
3. From a sociological point of view, however, this conceptualization is unduly narrow. To start
with, we know that the sanctioner can and does respond to the actions of the target, as well as viceversa. At a minimum, then, both the target and the sanctioner are faced with a strategic problem, not
simply a guessing game as to the likelihood of success. More importantly, though, the actions of
both are, in the classic Weberian sense, oriented to each other, as well as to third parties. This
means, for example, that the target grasps specific acts by the sanctioner as having a particular,
target-specific intention which permits those acts to be identified and responded to as sanctions,
rather than, say, routine bureaucratic procedures or attempts to subsidize a domestic competitor.
From this point of view, the issue of sanctions “leakage” is best conceived of as the target’s
inference that the sanctioners do not really care if the target changes its policies, rather than simply
as a sign that certain commodities are readily substitutable or that sanctioners have difficulties in
coordinating their activities. Such an inference is more likely if the sanctioners use softer rhetoric,
or take a longer time to act, or engage in friendly relations with the target in other issue areas.
4. These observations point to a basic problem in both the design and the evaluation of UN targeted
sanctions. Because those sanctions target “leaders, decision-makers, and their principal supporters,
rather than an entire population” (Biersteker 2009: 2) and typically involve particular activities of
those targets (e.g., travel; bank accounts; international sports competitions), the desired change in
behavior is supposed to operate by the target’s prioritizing the Security Council’s actions relative to
those particular activities. Specifically, the target must consider the Security Council as of some
salience relative to other reference groups (domestic actors, other states); similarly, the activities in
question must be salient relative to others (e.g., handshakes at conferences, cooperation on task
forces). The latter form of salience is germane to any kind of sanctions short of the complete
isolation envisioned in the League of Nations’ Article 16 (“the severance of all trade or financial
relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals”), but the former is specific to
UN targeted sanctions. It is obvious that the Security Council may be less significant for certain
targets than a variety of domestic actors; but it is also quite possible that the Council’s actions,
however binding they may be in international law, are of lower importance for the target than is, for
example, a business as usual attitude by neighboring states or, for that matter, even a permanent
member of the Council. Even if the latter apply the sanctions in question, a grudging or
embarrassed attitude on their part can, in effect, reconstitute the actions as a slap on the wrist or as a
message to sit tight and wait out the storm. Conversely, if the Council is seen as unlikely to react in
some positive sense to subsequent changes in behavior by the target (say because several of its
members are implacable foes of the target in question), then it also is of less significance for the
target as a reference group.
5. The conceptualization sketched out above depicts sanctioner and target as interacting socially. In
principle, the sanctioner reacts to behavior on the part of the target (or groups linked to it) and, by
adopting sanctions, thereby labels the target as deviant. In turn, the target, insofar as it prioritizes
the sanctioner as a relevant reference group, will alter its behavior in hopes of removing the label of
deviant. This is particularly likely if the sanctioner’s actions are grasped by the target as indicative
that the behavior in question is indeed deviant; and if the sanctioner is seen as rewarding a change
in behavior.1 This suggests that a theory of how sanctions and sanctioned behavior are related will
have two components.
6. First, the actions of the sanctioner must be seen as a sanction directed at the target. If the actions
occur long after the target’s behavior in question, or if they are aimed at a variety of actors rather
than the target, or if they are accompanied by some type of stigma-attaching labelling procedure, or
if they are undercut by abstentions, or winks and nudges, or if they are seen as the precursor to an
invasion or other forms of military action, then they are not, sociologically speaking, sanctions at
all. We can only theorize about the efficacy of sanctions when there are sanctions in the first place.
Of course, for purposes of research design (see below), cases of non-sanctions are important to
include in any eventual study, but the point here is that not everything labelled as a sanction is in
fact one, at least for purposes of theorizing about sanctions.
7. Second, there must be an interaction between the target’s change of policies (if any) and the
sanctioner’s removal of the sanctions. To become a deviant and to exit from that status are
processes which take some time to unfold. For over half a century, at least since Becker’s famous
article on marijuana users (1953), we have known that deviants take a while to inhabit the role; even
a subclass of this process, i.e., the attaching of a label to the actor in question, is rarely a matter of
simply uttering a sentence. By the same token, it took some 17 years for the UN to go from
debating South Africa’s racially discriminatory policies to the Security Council adopting a
voluntary arms embargo (South Africa decided to withdraw from the Commonwealth two years
earlier). Similarly, even when sanction-removing deals are negotiated relatively quickly, it can take
a significant amount of time fully to end sanctions, have the changed policy be considered as real,
and readmit the target to the fold (for example, it arguably took ten years for Libya’s rehabilitation
to be achieved, and even that, as the recent al-Megrahi case illustrates, is not yet complete). Thus,
for sanctions to be effective, there must be an interlocked (though not necessarily coordinated or
planned in advance) series of actions by both the target and the sanctioner.
8. Neither of these theoretical components tells us anything about what a full-fledged theory of UN
targeted sanctions’ effectiveness would actually look like. They are what we might call the
necessity conditions for such a theory: that the Security Council must have instituted something we
could qualify as bona fide sanctions, and that there must have been some kind of over-time
interactive process involving a change in the target’s behavior and the removal of sanctions. The
1
References on some of the relevant sociological literature on reference groups, deviance, and labelling can be found in
various places, e.g., Warren (2009).
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type of sanctions, the type of target, the type of behavior in question, not to mention issues of speed,
timing, and so forth: any or all of these may be part of a theory of effectiveness, and to generate
such a theory, it may be useful to look at a number of cases in which there is variation on certain of
those factors.
9. Thus far, we have a sociological conceptualization of effective sanctions and a sociological
theory of the necessary conditions under which sanctions can be effective. As regards research
design, there are three issues to be addressed: measurement, analytical method, and case selection.
10. How do we determine whether or not a particular situation is characterized by the imposition of
bona fide sanctions, i.e., as actions which do not run athwart of the criteria discussed in (6) above?
In part, this is a matter of attending to the conditions under which a Security Council resolution was
voted, as well as to the statements of the Council members at the time and subsequently. However,
what also matters is how the Council’s action is understood by the target and by third parties. In this
regard, it is important that a coding scheme be set up to ascertain the convergence, or lack thereof,
in different actors’ categorization of whatever the Council does. This is not simply an issue of
determining whether or not a particular action was aimed at a given target’s behavior, but also of
whether the target is considered by all concerned as deviant by dint of having engaged in the
behavior.
11. Many studies of sanctions, whether targeted or comprehensive, are what can be called singleshot: they look at whether the target of the sanctions in fact changed its behavior. By contrast, the
sociological approach proposed here focuses on interlocked sequences of actions by both the target
of the sanctions and the sanctioner(s). To see whether in fact such sequences took place, it is
necessary first to identify any given action as bearing on the desired change in behavior and/or on
the maintenance or relaxation of the sanctions; and second as connected both to the actor’s
preceding actions and to those of the actor’s interlocutor (i.e., for the target, the sanctioner, and
vice-versa). It need not be assumed that every such interaction sequence will involve dozens of
moves and take many years to work out, nor that each pair of moves in the sequence need be
temporally tightly coupled, but each component of the posited sequence must be shown,
presumably by the language used at the time, to be linked to earlier actions.
12. Standard research design criteria, when applied to the hypothesized two necessity conditions for
effective sanctions, suggest that cases be partitioned along two dimensions: (a) whether or not a
bona fide sanction was imposed; and (b) whether or not there was an interlocked sequence in which
target and sanctioner walked back the relationship. At a minimum, this implies three sets of cases:
first, those in which a sanction was imposed and an interlocking sequence later was produced;
second, those in which a sanction was imposed and an interlocking sequence not produced; and
third, those in which no sanction was imposed (presumably, the fourth combinatorial possibility –
no sanction but an interlocking sequence – makes no sense). Looking only at the first set of cases
may be illuminating as a way of generating more fully-elaborated theories, but by itself is
inadequate as a way of assessing whether in fact both of the posited components are in fact
necessity conditions.
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References
Becker, Howard S. (1953) “Becoming a Marihuana User,” American J. of Sociology 59,3: 235-42.
Biersteker, Thomas (2009) “Evaluating the Effects and Effectiveness of UN Targeted Sanctions,”
IHEID/CCDP, July.
Crawford, Neta C. and Klotz, Audie (1999) “How Sanctions Work: A Framework for Analysis,” in
idem, eds., How Sanctions Work: Lessons From South Africa, Houndmills and London: Macmillan.
Warren, Danielle E. (2003) “Constructive and Destructive Deviance in Organizations,” Academy of
Management R. 28,4: 622-32.
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