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Economic sanctions and global governance: The case of Iraq
Abstract
This article looks at the history of economic sanctions as a tool of global governance. For much of the twentieth century, sanctions were seen as a non-violent alternative to military intervention. As a form of international governance, sanctions have always been characterised by conflicting claims: that sanctions are effective enough to punish or block wrongful acts by states; but they are at the same time measures that will not cause damage to the population as a whole, in the way that warfare does. The sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations Security Council illustrate how sanctions at their most extreme can in fact be fully as damaging as warfare.
This paper assesses the effectiveness of employing economic sanctions to address human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang region against the Uyghur population. By drawing from historical cases in Iraq and South Africa where economic sanctions were previously enforced to combat human rights violations, this paper will identify specific factors that contribute to the success and failure of sanctions and their implications for the Xinjiang case. For this purpose, an extensive literature review of past research and studies relating to these cases and economic sanctions as a whole was conducted to analyze the impact of various complexing factors. The findings of this paper underscore the multitude of factors that influence each case, including aspects such as the reasonability of a sanction’s goal and the level of economic interdependence between sanctioning countries. Ultimately, this paper argues that in China’s case, economic sanctions would likely do more harm than good due to a lack of transparency surrounding the status of human rights in the Xinjiang region and the country’s formidable economic influence.
The proliferation of conflicts across borders of Middle Eastern States has transformed the landscapes of health and healthcare across the region. In the case of Iraq, state healthcare has collapsed under the strain of protracted conflicts. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s post-war healthcare system is booming, and becoming more privatised. In this paper, we build on an ethnographic study on the movements and experiences of Iraqi patients in Lebanon to show how one of the consequences of war is the rise of alternative forms of healthcare–seeking practices and survival strategies – a therapeutic geography that is embedded in regional economies and geopolitical relations and reconfigurations. We argue for the need to reimagine the disconnectivity and connectivity of healthcare systems under war and conflict as grounded in the empirical realities and experiences of mobility in the Middle East.
What are the moral costs of democratic trade with dictatorships, and what action these costs demand of our elected governments? This article develops as a Rousseauian answer the idea that democracies ought to boycott corrupt dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves. I articulate the basis for this democratic disengagement, first through a reconstruction of Rousseau's social contract, as seeking to replace corrupt dependence with egalitarian interdependence between citizens. I then examine the potential for egalitarian interdependence between democracies that treat their citizens equally as collectively sovereign, contrasted with corrupting cooperation between democracies and dictatorships, which distorts democracies’ values, specifically by making them complicit in despots’ theft of their peoples’ resources. Ending this corruption requires disengagement, elaborated here first against liberal objections and then against skeptic criticism.
As Cold War threats have diminished, so-called weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and ballistic missiles--have become the new international bugbears. The irony is that the harm caused by these weapons pales in comparison to the havoc wreaked by a much more popular tool: economic sanctions. Tally up the casualties caused by rogue states, terrorists, and unconventional weapons, and the number is surprisingly small. The same cannot be said for deaths inflicted by international sanctions. The math is sobering and should lead the United States to reconsider its current policy of strangling Iraq.
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