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Christian von Soest
Individual Sanctions: Toward
a New Research Agenda
INTRODUCTION
Individual sanctions are an important subcategory
of economic sanctions, and an inextricable part of
the global security and human rights regime that has
informed inter national and national politic s since the
end of the Cold War. Shaping the international trend
of individualizing accountability (Sikkink 2009), the
United Nations, the United States, and the European
Union, as the main global sanction senders, blacklist
individuals to hold them accountable for the pro-
liferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs),
the instigation of armed conflict, the trafficking of
narcotics, or the violation of human rights.
In all its current 14 sanctions regimes, the UN
has blocked the travels and frozen the assets of
purported perpetrators (Biersteker et al. 2016). The
US for its part has implemented a list of ‘Specially
Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons’ since
1994, which has grown tremendously over the years
and presently contains over 1,200 pages of des-
ignated individuals and companies. Recently, an
undersecretary of the US Treasury dubbed its Office
of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is responsi-
ble for blacklisting, “the beating heart of US sanc-
tions authorities […] to change behavior, disrupt
illicit finance, and advance foreign policy priorities
across the globe” (Mandelker 2019). Even the EU,
which only star ted to impose sanctions autono-
mously in 2004, now runs a consolidated sanctions
list that comprises almost 500 pages of listed per-
sons and entities (as of November 2019).
However, we still lack fundamental knowledge
about the selection criteria and indeed the effects of
this important subcategory of economic sanctions.
In response, this article sets out to provide the basis
for a new research agenda that focuses on the speci-
ficities of individual sanctions.
THE MOVE TOWARD INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY
The emerging international human rights regime of
moving from state responsibility to the individual
(criminal) accountability of rulers for crimes that
they commit while in office has, in tandem with the
9/11 terrorist attacks, acted as a major boost for
sanctions targeting specific individuals. They also
appear more humane alternatives to comprehensive
sanctions that fall on the entire population of a tar-
geted country. Following Wallensteen and Grusell
Christian von Soest
GIGA Ge rman Institut e
of Global an d Area
Studies, Hamburg
(2012, 208), “[t]he idea of targeting sanctions at indi-
viduals not only was an innovative way for making
sanctions legitimate in the international system.
[…] It was morally appealing to demonstrate that
decision-makers were not personally exempt from
the impact and reactions that their policies were
causing”.
The main idea is to impose personal costs that
coerce listed decision-makers, terrorists, or regime
supporte rs into changing their behavior, to constrain
their room for maneuver, or simply to send signals of
disapproval to them – as well as to an international
and domestic audience (Giumelli 2013). However,
the use of these individual sanctions varies con-
siderably: while in the Central African Republic, for
instance, grave human rights violations and atroc-
ities resulted in only 13 individuals being put on
blacklists, the US and the EU designated more than
200 high-level Zimbabwean decision-makers – in-
cluding former president Rober t Mugabe and almost
all government ministers – to protest electoral
manipulation in that countr y. Even though scholars
and practitioners alike deem sanctions that target
top decision-makers most effective in changing the
policies in question, as well as in sending strong
signals about international norms, only rarely are
presidents blacklisted. Currently, just Venezuela’s
Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have
asset freezes and travel bans imposed on them,
while other heads of government who have commit-
ted the same or even more egregious human rights
violations are not targeted by the UN, the US, or
the EU. What accounts for these vast differences?
As of now, we are unable to systematically explain
this variance in the selection of individual sanctions
targets.
Important analyses that focus on the ethical and
legal implications of individual sanctions listings do
not contain comprehensive scrutiny of the number
and characteristics of designated individuals. The
same holds true for assessments – most often from
a legal perspective – of judicial challenges to indi-
vidual designatio ns, most notably the 20 08 Kadi case
heard before the European Court of Justice (Kokott
and Sobotta 2012), and regarding the rights of listed
persons (for example, Heupel 2013). Thus, despite
their ubiquitous us e and the emergence of an intense
debate about the legal and normative implications
of imposing individual sanctions, we still know lit-
tle about how and why the UN and Western powers
target specific individuals. Nor are we sufficiently
aware of what effects – intended and unintended –
indi vidual sanctions (in conjunction with more com-
prehensive economic sanctions) have.
Academics and practitioners seeking to gain
new insights about the targeting and the effects
of sanctions therefore need to focus on individual
sanctions as an important subcategor y of the overall
phenomenon. Currently, even the existing empirical
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CESifo Forum 4 / 2019 Dece mber Volum e 20
work on targeted sanctions (Biersteker et al. 2016)
bundles together different measures – namely, those
against specific economic sectors and those against
individuals – instead of looking at the specific char-
acteris tics, logic, and processes under lying the sanc-
tioning of individuals (Figure 1).
Systematically analyzing the number of black-
listed individuals and their proximity to political
decision-making in the target country would allow
for the detailed examination of UN, US, and EU list-
ings. Only if we better understand these selection
processes can we say more about whether and how
individual sanctions actually work (Hufbauer et al.
2007; Pape 1997).
ANALYZING THE TARGETING OF INDIVIDUAL
SANCTIONS
When a decision to impose travel bans and asset
freezes is made, decision-makers in the UN, the US,
and the EU choose how many and which persons
they target. The blacklisting decisions comprise
two dimensions that need to be assessed: (1) the
number of blacklisted individuals, and (2) their
closeness to political decision-making in the target
country (the ‘position’).
A New Analytic Framework
From the research on comprehensive and targeted
sanctions, we can infer that the choice to impose
individual sanctions is strategic, and determined
by a complex combination of threat perceptions,
domestic and international pressures, and rela-
tionships with t he target (Nossal 199 4; von Soest and
Wahman 2015). Sanction senders weigh the poten-
tial benefits of achieving their goals through indi-
vidual sanctions against their political/security-re-
lated, social, and economic costs. To account for
the decision-making process in the UN, the US, and
the EU, sanctions research should take into con-
sideration four crucial dimensions that together
all potentially shape the decision to blacklist indi-
viduals: trigger events, issue salience, sender-tar-
get relations, and sender
characteristics.
Trigger Events
The pressure to sanction
individuals will be especially
strong when drastic trigger
events – such as the killing
of the Saudi Arabian regime
critic Jamal Khashoggi in
2018, or the annexation of
Crimea by Russian forces in
2014 – draw global attention
and provide justification for
foreign intervention. Terrorist attacks or success-
ful coups d’état (Powell and Thyne 2011) are fur-
ther blatant signals to the international arena that
global peace and security are being threatened,
and human rights and democratic norms violated
(Peksen et al. 2014). In these instances, we would
expect to see particularly decisive action taken
against the involved individuals by the UN, the US,
and the EU.
Issue Salience
The readiness to impose individual sanctions also
depends on th e nature of the ‘disputed polic y’ (Dorus-
sen and Mo 2001) – as seen from the perspective of
the senders. The UN, the US, and the EU will be par-
ticularly inclined to impose sanctions on in dividuals
who directly threaten their direct interests and/or
who are characterized as ‘a threat to in ternational
peace and security’ (United Nations 1945). Ending
the proliferation of WMDs, terminating armed con-
flict, and countering terrorism will therefore be par-
ticularly salient goals that from the perspective of
senders necessitate the imposition of sanctions on
– potentially – responsible individuals, be they the
politically responsible decision-makers, members
of the security apparatus, the engineers needed
to construct nuclear facilities, or arms dealers.
Addressing issues such as money laundering and
drug trafficking also have direct repercussions for
sanction-sending entities.
Sender-target Relations
Senders take geostrategic reasoning as well as their
political and economic costs into consideration
when deciding how many and which individuals
to target. The senders’ potential costs for issuing
sanctions vary greatly depending on (a) the exist-
ing political, military, economic, and social rela-
tions between sender and target; as well as (b) the
target’s political strength and standing within the
global economy. In the economic realm, earlier
research emphasized the importance of trade links
Source: Author’s own compilation.
Comprehensive, Targeted, and Individual Sanctions
© ifo Institute
Comprehensive sanctions
Complete trade embargo
Affects the whole population
Targeted sanctions
Selective sanctions
Affect certain
economic sectors and
social groups
Individual sanctions
Affect selected
individuals – e.g.,
members of the poli-
tical elite
Figure 1
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CESifo Forum 4 / 2019 Dece mber Volu me 20
(McLean and Whang 2010)
and foreign direct investment
(Lektzian and Biglaiser 2013).
This calculation should also
influence the propensity to
sanction (high-ranking) in -
dividuals from particular
countries, most notably the
president and members of
their cabinet – as powerful states could retaliate. A
prominent example are the agricultural sanctions
that Russia imposed in response to Western mea-
sures in 2014 (Timofeev 2018). Western senders
might also be reluctant to target top policymakers
and a high number of individuals from regimes that
are generally supportive of Western security and
broader political objectives.
Sender Characteristics
Despite exhibiting similar basic threat perceptions
and issue salience considerations, the three main
global sanction senders – the UN, the US, and the
EU – differ in terms of their (a) basic goals and (b) in-
ternal coherence, both of which influence their
blacklisting behavior. Most fundamentally, we can
expect more decisive individual sanctions listing
(in terms of the number and position of blacklisted
in dividuals) the greater the sender’s internal coher-
ence is.
‒ The UN is the prime international body seeking
to guarantee international peace and security.
General listing decisions are made by the Unit-
ed Nations Security Council (UNSC), “a highly
politicized body” (Biersteker et al. 2016, 15) that
is dominated by its five permanent (P5) mem-
bers: China, France, Russia, the Unite d Kingdom,
and the US. As the P5 have diverging geostrate-
gic interests and norms (with Russia and China
generally being m ore ‘sanction skeptical’), UNSC
members will generally agree only on the ‘low-
est common denominator’ and target only in -
dividuals whose sanctioning is acceptable to all
P5 members.
‒ Compared to the UN and the US, the EU is a new
autonomous sanction sender. The ‘Basic Prin-
ciples on the Use of Restrictive Measures (Sanc-
tions)’ (European Union 2004) established the
Union’s own sanctions policy. Within the Union’s
complex legal framework, most sanctions are
issued under its Common Foreign and Security
Policy – which requires unanimity between all
28 (at the time of writing) member states for
moving forward with its main decisions. Never-
theless, the EU has sought to swiftly react to
transgressions and target responsible indi-
viduals. In addition, in line with its self-under-
standing as a union of liberal values, the EU
has recurrently used its restrictive measures
to strengthen human rights and democracy
abroad.
‒ The US is by far the most coherent and active
global sanction sender. Not only is it a key spon-
sor of UN sanctions but it also regularly applies
unilateral individual (and comprehensive) ones
too—that is, without the authorization of the
UNSC. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US
has entered into a ‘new era of financial war-
fare’ (Zarate 2013) and systematically uses the
country’s dominant position within the global
fi nancial system to block the funding of state
and non-state actors whom it perceives as a
threat to its security interests. In addition, the
US regularly undertakes unilateral action for
international democracy and human rights pro-
motion. Since the passing of the 2012 Magnitsky
Act, the US even has a special law that requi-
res the gov ernment to freeze the assets of pur-
ported human rights offenders and ban them
from entering the country. Furthermore,
assistance must automatically be terminated
in the event of a coup or with evidence of nuc-
lear proliferation (Miller 2014). As the US is the
most coherent a ctor, and also the one least cons-
trained by due process concerns, the number of
individuals targeted by it is significantly higher
than by the UN or the EU.
Figure 2 below summar izes the four main factors t hat
influence se nders’ decision to blacklis t an individual,
ones that should hence be analyzed closely in future
research.
Steps to Overcome the Research Lacunae
The research agenda on individual sanctions can
guide both large-N and small-N investigations on
the topic. In recent years, the availability of digital
trace data (often termed ‘big data’) has massively
expanded, as has the possibility to automatically
extra ct and systematically a nalyze this data with the
help of computer processing. As the UN, the US, and
the EU provide their blacklists in machine-readable
formats on their websites, these could be used for
the compilation of new data on individual sanctions
targeting as well as for statis tical analyses assessing
the blacklisting of individuals. The individual entries
could be linked to the legal documents that provide
Source: Author’s own compilation.
Summary of Main Factors Influencing Blacklisting Decisions
© ifo Institute
Trigger events
Issue salience
Sender-target relations
Sender characteristics
Number of listed individuals
Position of listed individuals
Figure 2
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CESifo Forum 4 / 2019 Dece mber Volu me 20
the sanctions goal – meaning the reason why a spe-
cific individual was blacklisted.
Based on the considerations presented in
this article, qualitative analysis would allow us
to re construct in greater detail the complex deci-
sion-making processes that drive listing strate-
gies. Semi-structured inter views could be used to
assess the considerations and perspectives of de-
cision-makers and administrators underpinning
the listing strategies of the UN, the US, and the EU.
The method is particularly suited to elucidating the
multifaceted dynamics behind individual target se -
lection and could therefore help to explain how list-
ing decisions are being made.
CONCLUSION
The UN, the US, and the EU all have increasingly
stressed the ‘individual accountability’ of policy-
makers, human rights violators, arms traders, and
countless other individuals who facilitate incrimi-
nated policies . The use and design of individual sa nc-
tions – and, more specifically, the selection of per-
sons to be sanctioned – has important practical and
normative implications for decision-makers from
both state institutions and advocacy organizations,
as well as for the general public.
In order to learn more about whether and how
sanctions ‘work’, research and policy need to focus
more on individual sanctions as a decisive sub-
category of the overall phenomenon. A new research
agenda on individual sanctions must star t with iden-
tifying the listing patterns, taking into consideration
at least four crucial dimensions: trigger event s, issue
salience, sender-target relations, and sender charac-
teristics. This promises to provide new insights into
which individuals are selected as sanction targets
and why, how listed individuals react, and in turn,
under what conditions individual sanctions lead
to a hardening of positions or induce a change of
behavior.
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