Skip to content

Are Smart Sanctions Feasible?

Literature › Works

Arne Tostensen; Beate Bull (2002). Are Smart Sanctions Feasible?. World Politics, Vol. 54, No. 3. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Type journal article
Scope Comparative and methods
Method synthesis review
Period studied 1945–2001
Regions Global (UN Security Council sanctions), Iraq, Yugoslavia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, South Africa (peripheral), Southern Rhodesia (peripheral)
Themes sanctions divestment, comparative theory
Citation key tostensen2002

Argument

The authors review the literature on 'smart' (targeted) sanctions, which combine humanitarian exemptions with targeting of elites through arms embargoes, financial sanctions and travel bans. They argue that smart sanctions remain tied to the flawed 'pain-gain' transmission assumption of conventional sanctions. They also face daunting technical, legal, financial and especially political obstacles, because sanctions regimes are products of Security Council bargaining and two-level games. Smart sanctions are therefore no panacea, and expectations of them should be scaled down. South Africa appears only in passing, as a case where the transmission mechanism and financial pressure worked, and as an example of NGO monitoring of the oil embargo.

Evidence and method

Secondary literature and policy documents. These include Cortright and Lopez, Hufbauer et al., Galtung, Pape, and van Gen?gten and de Groot. They also include papers and reports from the Interlaken, Bonn-Berlin and Watson Institute conferences, UN Security Council resolutions and OCHA reports. Case illustrations are Iraq, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Rwanda, UNITA, Sierra Leone and the Taliban. There is no original data or archival work.

Findings

  • Before the 1990s the UN Security Council imposed binding multilateral sanctions only twice, one of them the 1977 arms embargo on apartheid South Africa. (p. 2)

    Between 1945 and 1990 the UN Security Council had imposed multilateral sanctions only twice: a 1966 trade embargo against Southern Rhodesia's white minority government and a 1977 arms embargo against the South African apartheid regime.

  • The South African liberation movement's insistence on sanctions regardless of hardship helped sustain the pain-gain assumption. (p. 4)

    The position of the South African liberation movement in favor of sanctions, regardless of the hardship inflicted, no doubt lent credence to this assumption.

  • Sanctions are less likely to work against nondemocratic states because civilian pain cannot be converted into votes. (p. 6)

    The empirical findings suggest that the less democratic a country the more likely it is that economic sanctions will fail to change policies.

  • The transmission-mechanism problem undermines the usefulness of economic sanctions against nondemocratic regimes. (p. 6)

    This calls into question the usefulness of economic sanctions against nondemocratic states.

  • Large-scale studies find sanctions rarely succeed, though Hufbauer et al.'s relatively positive one-third success rate has been criticised as too generous. (p. 6)

    Hufbauer et al. conclude that success was achieved in about one-third of the

  • Arms embargoes have mostly failed because they are imposed often but rarely enforced. (p. 12)

    Cortright and Lopez conclude that in most cases arms embargoes have completely failed

  • There is general agreement that apartheid South Africa felt the pressure of financial sanctions, which contributed to its downfall, but this has not held in other cases. (p. 14)

    There is general agreement that in the case of South Africa, the apartheid regime did feel the pressure of financial sanctions and the

  • Targeted financial sanctions are hard to implement efficiently, because of tracing, circumvention via offshore centres and time lags. (p. 15)

    Targeted financial sanctions, however, are difficult to implement efficiently

  • Smart sanctions are not cheaper to enforce than conventional sanctions, so the cost problem persists. (p. 27)

    It is a fallacy to think that the smart sanctions concept will necessarily alleviate the cost problem of enforcement.

  • NGO monitoring (the Amsterdam Shipping Research Bureau) of the voluntary oil embargo on South Africa is offered as a model of citizen verification. (p. 30)

    to monitor oil tankers involved in supplying this cargo and to publicize the results widely as part of a

  • The authors conclude that smart sanctions, though logically attractive, are no panacea. (p. 31)

    While smart sanctions may seem logically compelling and conceptually attractive at face value, they are no panacea.