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The Termination of International Sanctions
Abstract
The termination of sanctions is an important but largely understudied phenomenon within international politics. Of the nearly 400 sanctions cases that were in place in 1990 or imposed thereafter, nearly three-quarters had been lifted by 2018. As almost all existing research has focused on threatened and imposed sanctions, we lack insight into when and how these measures are lifted. This is particularly the case for sanctions that have been terminated despite targets resisting senders’ demands. To remedy this, we conceptualize the protracted process of sanctions termination and conduct an in-depth analysis of termination patterns of European Union, United Nations, United States and regional-organization sanctions in the post-Cold War era using the novel International Sanctions Termination (IST) dataset. We compare commonalities and differences between sanctions senders and assess how often and under what conditions targeted governments either give in to or resist their demands. Finally, we discuss how the material and signalling properties of sanctions may affect political contestation in the targeted country after these measures have ended.
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Despite intense public and policy debates about the termination (and re-instatement) of sanctions in cases such as Iran, Cuba and Russia, research has hitherto focused on sanctions imposition and effectiveness, directing little attention towards their removal. Existing work has been constrained by a lack of adequate data. In response, we introduce a novel dataset that contains information on the termination of all EU, UN, US and regional sanctions between 1990 and 2018. In contrast to previous datasets, which rely on media reports, the International Sanctions Termination (IST) dataset systematically codes official governmental and intergovernmental documents. It contains information on the design of sanctions – including expiry dates, review provisions and termination requirements – and captures the gradual process of adapting and ending sanctions. The article describes the data collection process, considers IST’s complementarity to and compatibility with existing datasets, and discusses the newly captured variables, exploring how they affect the termination of sanctions. The results indicate that changes in the sender’s goals and investments in monitoring devices lead to significantly longer sanctions spells. By contrast, clearly stipulated termination requirements decrease the expected duration of sanctions.
The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.
With the proliferation of sanctions after the end of the Cold War, the termination of these punitive measures has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in international politics. Yet, research has hitherto almost exclusively focused on sanctions’ implementation and effectiveness, whereas their termination has received little attention. In this paper, we draw on studies analyzing the varying duration of sanctions to examine under which conditions they end. In contrast to prior research that has mostly treated the end of sanctions as a single category, our analysis disaggregates sanctions termination by target compliance and sender capitulation. We run a competing risks model using novel dyadic sanctions data and show that the determinants of both outcomes significantly diverge. While poor economic health and high political volatility in the target country make it significantly more likely to comply, political alignment between the sender and target and leadership changes in the sender country lead to a higher probability of sender capitulation.
Policymakers employ economic sanctions to deal with a wide range of international challenges, making them an indispensable foreign policy tool. While scholarship on sanctions has tended to focus on the factors affecting their success, newer research programs have emerged that explore the reasons for why sanctions are threatened and initiated, the ways they are designed and enforced, and their consequences. This scholarship has yielded a wealth of new insights into how economic sanctions work, but most of those insights are based on sanctions observations from the 20th Century. The ways that policymakers employ sanctions have fundamentally changed over the past two decades, though, raising concerns about whether historically derived insights are still relevant to contemporary sanctions policies. In this forum, the contributors discuss the scholarly and policy-relevant insights of existing research on sanctions and then explore what gaps remain in our knowledge and new trends in sanctions policymaking. This forum will inform readers on the state of the art in sanctions research and propose avenues for future research.
Twelve years after the adoption of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, scholars and policymakers are still pondering whether the regional document has had any actual effect. Based on case studies from Madagascar and Burkina Faso, this article demonstrates the Charter’s impact on political dynamics within both countries. By analysing contestations around the application of Article 25(4), which defines who is eligible to run in transitional elections, I show that various national and international actors (attempt to) use the Charter as a legal script to limit access to state power and restrict the electorate’s voting choices. That these attempts are highly contentious is evidence of the Charter’s effect. If it were seen as irrelevant, nobody would bother to contest it. I therefore suggest studying the effects of the Charter from a different analytical angle – that is, “bottom-up” – by focusing on the settings and places in which it is actually applied.
Targeted sanctions are increasingly used by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to address major challenges to international peace and security. Unlike other sanctions, those imposed by the UN are universally binding and relied upon as a basis for legitimating both unilateral and regional sanctions measures. Encompassing a wide range of individual, diplomatic, financial, and sectoral measures, targeted sanctions allow senders to target a specific individual, corporate entity, region, or sector, helping to minimize the negative effects of sanctions on wider populations. This article introduces the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC) quantitative and qualitative datasets, which encompass all UN targeted sanctions imposed between 1991 and 2013, or 23 different country regimes broken into 63 case episodes for comparative analysis. Adding to existing datasets on sanctions (HSE, TIES), these new, closely interrelated datasets enable scholars using both quantitative and qualitative methods to: (1) differentiate among different purposes, types of sanctions, and target populations, (2) assess the scope of different combinations of targeted measures, (3) access extensive details about UN sanctions applied since the end of the Cold War, and (4) analyze changing dynamics within sanctions regimes over time in ways other datasets do not. The two TSC datasets assess UN targeted sanctions as effective 22% of the time and describe major aspects of UN targeted sanctions regimes, including the types of sanctions, their purposes and targets, impacts, relationships with other institutions, sanctions regimes, and policy instruments, mechanisms of coping and evasion, and unintended consequences.
International sanctions are one of the most commonly used tools to instigate democratisation in the post-Cold War era. However, despite long-term sanction pressure by the European Union, the United States and/or the United Nations, non-democratic rule has proven to be extremely persistent. Which domestic and international factors account for the regimes' ability to resist external pressure? Based on a new global dataset on sanctions from 1990 to 2011, the results of a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) provide new insights for the research on sanctions and on authoritarian regimes. Most significantly, sanctions strengthen authoritarian rule if the regime manages to incorporate their existence into its legitimation strategy. Such an unintended ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect occurs where sanctions are imposed on regimes that possess strong claims to legitimacy and have only limited economic and societal linkages to the sender of sanctions.
A theory of sanction duration that focuses on differences between democratic and nondemocratic states in the structure of leaders’ support coalitions is tested, using a hazard model to analyze a data set of 47 sanction events with 272 observations. Results show that leadership change strongly affects the duration of sanctions only in the case of nondemocratic states. Leadership change in democratic states is unrelated to the duration of sanctions; however, leadership change in nondemocratic sender and nondemocratic target states is strongly related to the ending of economic sanctions.
Targeted sanctions have been extensively used by states throughout history to achieve political objectives. This article examines the European Union’s and United States’ targeted sanctions against the Zimbabwean regime, which have been in place for several years. The central thesis of the article is that the sanctions are not effective and thus have failed to achieve the political objectives of both the European Union and the United States. Numerous violations of the travel ban and the financial restrictions have undermined the general effectiveness of the sanctions. A detailed analysis of each individual measure empirically supports the argument that the ineffectiveness of the sanctions has negatively influenced the achievement of the political objectives. In addition, by taking a closer look at Risa Brooks’ theory and discussing it in regards to the Zimbabwean sanctions, attention is drawn to the question of how to target authoritarian regimes. Seit Jahrzehnten sind zielgerichtete Sanktionen ein wichtiges Instrument der internationalen Politik. Der vorliegende Artikel untersucht die von der Europäischen Union und den Vereinigten Staaten verhängten Sanktionen gegen das simbabwische Regime, die seit einigen Jahren wirksam sind. Zentrales Argument des Autors ist, dass diese Sanktionen bislang nicht effektiv waren und die damit verbundenen politischen Ziele daher nicht erreicht werden konnten. Zahlreiche Verstöße gegen das Reiseverbot und die Finanzrestriktionen haben die Wirksamkeit der Sanktionen untergraben. Eine empirische Analyse der einzelnen Sanktionsmaßnahmen unterstützt das Argument, dass die Ineffektivität der Sanktionen die Durchsetzung der politischen Ziele verhindert hat. Mit Blick auf die Theorie von Risa A. Brooks wird zudem der Frage nachgegangen, wie zielgerichtete Sanktionen gegen autoritäre Regime funktionieren können.
International sanctions have become the instrument of choice for policymakers dealing with a variety of different challenges to international peace and security. This is the first comprehensive and systematic analysis of all the targeted sanctions regimes imposed by the United Nations since the end of the Cold War. Drawing on the collaboration of more than fifty scholars and policy practitioners from across the globe (the Targeted Sanctions Consortium), the book analyzes two new databases, one qualitative and one quantitative, to assess the different purposes of UN targeted sanctions, the Security Council dynamics behind their design, the relationship of sanctions with other policy instruments, implementation challenges, diverse impacts, unintended consequences, policy effectiveness, and institutional learning within the UN. The book is organized around comparisons across cases, rather than country case studies, and introduces two analytical innovations: case episodes within country sanctions regimes and systematic differentiation among different purposes of sanctions.
Powerful countries like the United States regularly employ economic sanctions as a tool for promoting their foreign policy interests. Yet this foreign policy tool has an uninspiring track record of success, with economic sanctions achieving their goals less than a third of the time they are imposed. The costs of these failed sanctions policies can be significant for the states that impose them, their targets, and the other countries they affect. Explaining economic sanctions' high failure rate therefore constitutes a vital endeavor for academics and policy-makers alike.
Busted Sanctions seeks to provide this explanation, and reveals that the primary cause of this failure is third-party spoilers, or sanctions busters, who undercut sanctioning efforts by providing their targets with extensive foreign aid or sanctions-busting trade. In quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing over 60 years of U.S. economic sanctions, Bryan Early reveals that both types of third-party sanctions busters have played a major role in undermining U.S. economic sanctions. Surprisingly, his analysis also reveals that the United States' closest allies are often its sanctions' worst enemies. The book offers the first comprehensive explanation for why different types of sanctions busting occur and reveals the devastating effects it has on economic sanctions' chances of success.
Do economic sanctions destabilize the governments they target? A form of foreign pressure, sanctions are typically meant to alter the policies of other countries. There is much pessimism on whether they ever work. This article shows that economic pressure works in at least one respect: it destabilizes the leaders it targets. I present a theoretical argument that explains why destabilization is a necessary condition for successful coercion. I find evidence that pressure destabilizes in a large panel of cross-country time-series data. The destabilization finding indicates that sanctions may be more effective at altering policies than we think. I conclude by noting that greater optimism regarding the effectiveness of sanctions should be balanced by a careful consideration of the policy's real and sizeable costs for those caught in the middle.
Wars of attrition are ubiquitous, spanning industrial disputes, instrumentalist economic sanctions episodes,1 oligopolistic price wars, animal conflicts, sundry sporting contests and the standard military examples. Nations and individuals enter wars of attrition hoping that conflict will become intolerable for their opponent before it does for them. Persistence is costly, but the persistent prevail.
Sanctions, long a tool of United Nations (UN) action, are increasingly being used by regional actors in their responses to conflict. However, while the UN applies sanctions in response to a variety of crises types (including civil wars, interstate conflicts, acts of terrorism, and nuclear proliferation), the African regional organizations (ROs) have concentrated their use of sanctions almost exclusively on states that undergo an unconstitutional change of government, most often because of a coup d’état. What accounts for this pattern and (apparent) division of labor? There are two possible hypotheses. First, regional action could be an effort to fill a void when no UN action is forthcoming, either because the UN Security Council (UNSC) is deadlocked or unwilling to address the situation or does not have the conflict on its agenda. Second, this sanctions pattern may indicate a particular type of problem that the Security Council is not pursuing and that the ROs want to address, and sanctions are a useful means to that end.
In recent years, the international community has increasingly come to abandon the use of comprehensive sanctions in favour of targeted sanctions. Unlike adopting a coercive strategy on entire states, actors like the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) have come to resort to measures that are aimed at individuals, groups and government members. Targeted sanctions involve adopting measures such as asset freezes, travel bans, commodity sanctions, as well as arms embargoes. Eriksson argues that recent changes in the practice of sanctions from comprehensive to targeted sanctions requires a new way of understanding international sanctions practice. Not only do we need to rethink our methodology to assess recent practice, but also to rethink the very theory of sanctions. This valuable new perspective provides recent thinking on targeted sanctions, trends in practice and unique case studies for evaluation. Based on substantial research, this is a must-read for students, scholars and practitioners interested in international politics.
Sanctions are frequently applied by the UN Security Council (UNSC) as well as regional organizations. While the objectives sought often vary, a frequent commonality is that they target African states. Indeed, Africa is the most frequently targeted continent by the UNSC and regional organisations including the African Union, Economic Community of West African States and the European Union. However, little attention has been paid to the confluence of this sanctions activity by these different organizations. This article seeks to address this gap in the research. While the UNSC continues to focus on sanctioning to end hostilities, the regional organizations have assigned themselves unconstitutional changes to government as the principal reason to sanction African states. Drawing on data from the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), this article suggests that: 1) regional organisations are leading UNSC activity more often than is appreciated in the literature; 2) the UNSC has of late been expanding its sanctioning activity to consider issues of democracy and good governance; 3) the UNSC uses sanctions to endorse the activity of African regional organizations to deal with crises on the continent; and 4) UNSC and regional sanctions are intimately tied to crisis management in Africa.
United Nations sanctions are authorized by the international body that is legally charged with the maintenance of international peace and security, the UN Security Council. They are grounded in provisions of the UN Charter. However, only a fraction of all international sanctions are mandated by the UN. One of the findings of this article, which is based on data collected by the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), is that the large majority of UN sanctions are preceded by non-UN sanctions, particularly sanctions by the United States and the European Union. Furthermore, it is common practice, particularly by the US and the EU, to add sanction provisions of their own to UN sanctions. As a result, for most UN sanctions, there are also non-UN sanctions against the same targets. Such combined sanction regimes add restrictions imposed by only some governments to those that all countries have to implement. Combined sanction regimes are therefore potentially more effective in achieving the targeted outcome than UN sanctions, which represent the lowest common denominator achievable among the members of the UN Security Council. On the other hand, combined sanction regimes might suffer from a type of ‘sanctions fatigue’. A growing number of states outside of the West are openly opposed to unilateral sanctions. Adding non-UN sanctions to UN sanctions might reduce their willingness to support UN sanctions. The TSC data, however, does not support such a contention. Rather, the data indicates that combined sanction regimes are more effective than stand-alone UN sanctions. Still, the US and EU governments—as the main drivers of sanctions policy in general and UN sanctions in particular—need to be aware of this criticism in order not to unwittingly undermine the UN sanctions instrument.
Parting from conventional studies on economic sanctions that look at the properties of the targeted state, this study focuses on the institutional origins of economic sanctions. I observe that most US sanctions either originate from the legislative or the executive branch. Building on this observation, I argue and present evidence that the institutional origin of a US sanction has a discernible effect on that sanction's duration. An institutional approach underpins the theory I develop to explain this difference. The veto-point approach focuses on the institutional inertia bestowed upon foreign policy actions executed through law and suggests that sanctions imposed as law should last longer than those carried out by executive order. Semi-parametric duration analysis conducted on the recently released Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions data confirms this expectation.
It may seem preposterous to write about the effects of the economic sanctions currently in effect against Rhodesia since the process is not yet completed: we do not know how it will all end, and primary source material of a crucial nature is not yet available. But the purpose of this article is more in the direction of a general theory, using the case of Rhodesia as a source of examples and illustrations. The material on Rhodesia included here consists of some secondary sources, such as books and articles, and some primary sources, such as documents and other printed material; but the basic sources are mainly personal observation and a number of informal interviews with Rhodesian citizens (mostly businessmen) and with citizens of other African countries (mostly politicians), all dating from January 1966, about two months after UDI.
In this research we consider the determinants of economic sanction duration. Why do some sanction episodes last longer than others do? Why do some target states concede faster than others do? To explain the duration of sanction episodes we consider the target's institutional struture and its political stability We develop a theoretical framework based on the target's political features and apply this model to 108 sanction cases using hazard analysis. Our empirical findings indicate that the target state's features, especially its institutional structure and the politcal vulnerability of its regime, significantly impact the duration of sanction episodes.
The democratic peace literature has focused primarily on militarized conflict; however, aspects of the democratic peace may influence how states use economic sanctions. This article investigates how democracies sanction both each other and other non-democracies. Because economic sanctions are very different from military force, some aspects of the democratic peace, such as the more peaceful nature of democracies, do not apply to the decision to sanction. However, several democratic peace factors should influence the use of economic sanctions, such as institutional constraints, shared values, and quick resolutions often found between two democracies. Using updated economic sanction data from 1978 through 2000, the article employs rare-event logit analysis to show that the democratic peace does influence the use of economic coercion - democracies are less likely to sanction each other. It also shows that democracies employ sanctions more than other regime types, in part because democracies pursue human rights and democratization goals with economic sanctions. The results further reveal that unlike other countries, the United States is not hesitant to sanction its allies.
Economic sanctions, increasingly used as instruments of foreign policy in recent decades, have been the focus of numerous academic studies. Recent theoretical advances in our understanding of sanctions cannot be tested adequately with existing data. This article presents a newly developed dataset that contains information on 888 cases in which sanctions were threatened and/or implemented in the 1971—2000 period. We describe the dataset, present descriptive statistics for some of the key variables included, and offer comparisons with the Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot dataset on sanctions that has been frequently used in previous research. We also present simple statistical relationships between sanctions outcomes and some of the variables commonly believed to affect sanctions success.
The recent veneration of the Iraq sanctions program as having prevented Saddam Husayn from obtaining Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) obscures important lessons regarding the program's political failures. Through an examination of factors such as Iraq's rationing system and flaws in the sanctions' design, this article shows how the imposition of sanctions strengthened rather than weakened Husayn's government. An analysis of the case of Iraq also may provide insights on how other governments have been able to survive lengthy international sanctions or trade embargos.
With an inconclusive track record, questions about the future utility of sanctions continue to plague policy makers and scholars. Drawing on previous episodes, both successful and failed sanctions tell us a great deal about economic coercion, but the causes of failure have been largely understudied. In order to further understanding of the coercive influence of sanctions, the analysis presented here delineates between the determinants of failure and success. To this end, a competing risks event history model is employed to test the impact that domestic politics have on sanctions success as well as sanctions failure, with strong results suggesting that political structures do affect the way states respond to economic coercion.
While intended as a nonviolent foreign policy alternative to military intervention, sanctions have often worsened humanitarian and human rights conditions in the target country. This article examines the relationship between economic sanctions and state-sponsored repression of human rights. Drawing on both the public choice and institutional constraints literature, I argue that the imposition of economic sanctions negatively impacts human rights conditions in the target state by encouraging incumbents to increase repression. Specifically, sanctions threaten the stability of target incumbents, leading them to augment their level of repression in an effort to stabilize the regime, protect core supporters, minimize the threat posed by potential challengers, and suppress popular dissent. The empirical results support this theory. These findings provide further evidence that sanctions impose political, social, and physical hardship on civilian populations. They also underscore a need for improvements in current strategies and mechanisms by which states pursue foreign-policy goals and the international community enforces international law and stability.
Research on when economic sanctions end has emphasized either the international bargaining game played by the sender and the target or the redistributive politics and ruling coalition changes in each state. We contend that neither approach offers a fully satisfactory explanation for economic coercion termination. Bargaining is inconsistent with long coercion episodes while ruling coalition changes cannot inform our understanding of very short episodes. We argue that both bargaining factors and domestic realignments matter, but the influence of bargaining factors declines as a sanctions episode continues while the relevance of domestic realignments increases over time. Our empirical tests, which utilize the new Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions data set, provide support for both the bargaining and domestic realignment approaches, suggesting that unifying them is beneficial.
Since the beginning of detente in the sixties the United States’ economic policy toward the Soviet Union has steered a zig-zag
course. The latest spectacular step was President Reagan’s lift—apparently without an adequate quid pro quo—of the embargo
on grain and phosphates imposed by his predecessor in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Our author explains
the interplay of different interests and schools of thought bearing on trade policy as an instrument for pursuing foreign
policy objectives.
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