Conflicted sanctions
Since the end of the Cold War, coercive international sanctions have been on the rise. Two prominent examples were the sanctions imposed against Iraq and against Serbia in the late 20th century. The economic impact of the sanctions has been devastating in magnitude.1 When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the international community responded by introducing the most comprehensive sanctions the world had ever seen (UN Resolution 661; US Iraq Sanctions Act, November 1990). After the subsequent military liberation of Kuwait in 1991 the sanctions remained in place. They aimed mainly at forcing Iraq to reveal and abandon its weapons of mass destruction program, to recognize Kuwait and to pay reparations (UN Resolution 687).
Sanctions against Serbia introduced in early 1998 by the UN and, more strongly, by Western powers (most notably the US and the European Union) aimed to put a stop to the political violence against Kosovo Albanians organized by the Serbian government. Similar to Iraq, sanctions remained in place after military intervention forced Serbian āpolice forcesā out of Kosovo. Sanctions aimed to pacify the Balkans, enforce the recognition of a politically separate Kosovo and foster democratic reform.
The aim of sanctions against both Iraq and Serbia was to enforce cooperation in conflict. I define coercive international sanctions among states as measures short of military violence which are socially conceived as being instigated by an initiator to induce the cooperation of an addressee with articulated demands in a mutual political conflict. Coercing cooperation means that the addressee is to significantly change its political position as constructed in the mutual conflict, in line with the demands of the initiator(s). Measures include economic and non-economic instruments, such as economic restrictions or incentives; political encroachment or diplomatic recognition; restricting or increasing non-economic exchanges.
Although the two cases of sanctions were similarly aimed at enforcing cooperation, they had vastly different results, even though the economic impact and accompanying circumstances (military intervention) were comparable. Iraq never gave in to any meaningful degree. It proved impossible to achieve consistent and enduring cooperation with weapons inspectors and thus to bring about any significant change in the political position of Saddam Husseinās regime. The success of the sanctions was limited to containing Saddam Hussein militarily (cf. Blix 2004:272).
The aim of the sanctions against Serbia might be considered more ambitious, yet nevertheless they were clearly more successful (Blockmans 2007; see also Portela 2010; de Vries 2002). Political change was profound. After less than two years, democratic elections were held; a few weeks later, Slobodan Milosevic resigned from power and Serbian nationalism no longer posed an immediate threat to peace and stability in the Balkans. Several high-ranking officials allegedly involved in committing war crimes, among them Slobodan Milosevic himself, have been turned over to the UN International Criminal Tribunal.
This is of course a simplified presentation of the two cases that is nevertheless instructive. Their remarkable difference in outcomes raises three puzzling observations. First, using existing approaches to economic sanctions, one would not expect a more successful outcome in the case of Serbia, where economic damage was less severe and international cooperation was significantly lower, with China and particularly Russia actively backing its government. By contrast, the Iraq case fulfilled the conventional criteria for successful sanctions much more so than Serbia: It was politically isolated (cf. Preeg 1999), the coercion attempt had full UN backing (cf. Martin 1993) and the country faced even greater damage to its economy (cf. Dashti-Gibson, Davis, and Radcliff 1997; Pape 1997). In addition, other factors that are considered significant are constant across both cases and thus prevent us from accounting for developments. In neither case was there any reason for the āsender statesā and ātarget statesā of the sanctions to have anything less than high expectations of future conflict, i.e. they both should have been equally concerned about their relative bargaining positions vis-Ć -vis the sender states in the future (cf. Drezner 1999).
Second, one of the most significant differences across the two conflicts with respect to sanctions policies was the simultaneous use of negative and positive sanctions, a combined sanctions strategy in the case of Serbia. Apart from financial restrictions, a ban on petroleum and petroleum products, a visa ban and a flight ban, the United States and the European Union provided positive incentives to support political change in Serbia (e.g. the āEnergy for Democracyā project).2 By contrast, sanctions against Iraq resorted heavily to a negative sanctions strategy. Is a combined sanctions strategy possibly more promising in promoting cooperation?
Third, the result of the sanctions against Serbia was not just calculated cooperation with increased demands. Official views regarding what the conflict was about had changed substantially. After the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) won the parliamentary election in December 2000 and Zoran ÄinÄiÄ became Prime Minister, a notion of a mutual conflict took hold that allowed for negotiation and cooperation (Schimmelfennig, Engert, and Knobel 2006:88ā90). The end of the Milosevic government meant that the conflict matter took on a much more humble shape, as an issue of contested ethnic and territorial affiliations that had to be politically negotiated; it was no longer cast as a centuries-long fight against attacking intruders (Uzgel 2001). Sanctions in turn significantly promoted such transformation (Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott 2007, Case Study 98ā2). How does such transformation occur?
Taken together, the existing literature on coercive international sanctions at best provides partial answers to these conundrums and questions. Corresponding to the three puzzling observations outlined above, there are three issues that merit further consideration. First, coercive international sanctions do not seem to entirely conform to a logic whereby significant economic impact would translate into substantial political pressure. This calls their meaning into question. Why did Iraq not acquiesce? For Serbia, if anything, sanctions should have coerced the government into cooperation earlier, when GDP fell from USD 23bn to 15bn in the 1990s. Why did cooperation only occur after 1999? In 2004, in another instance of tightening sanctions, US President George W. Bush observed about fruitless US efforts against the Islamic Republic of Iran: āWeāre relying upon others, because weāve sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran ā¦ in other words, we donāt have much leverage with the Iranians right nowā.3 Essentially, it remains a mystery how an agent in an international conflict could sanction itself out of (political) influence on a target state, as President Bush suggested.
Second, existing literature is fairly silent and discordant concerning the different influence that negative sanctions and combined or positive sanctions strategies have on conflict development. Contributions that attempt to account for developments in terms of domestic political factors by disaggregating the target state treat negative and positive economic sanctions as logically indistinct, part of a zero-sum equation between economic gain and loss. Contributions that account for conflict development in terms of relational factors between adversaries at the international level sometimes recognize the difference between trying the stick and offering a carrot, but do not offer any insight into the peculiarities of combined sanctions strategies.
Third, in the case of Serbia, cooperation did in fact occur only after conflict transformation. Such transformation effectively re-defined the interests of the target state that were usually taken as fixed, reflecting the utility calculus that typically underlies conceptions of coercive sanctions. It also changed future conflict expectations that had hitherto been assumed constant by game-theoretical approaches such as Dreznerās (1999). Sanctions ultimately transformed the conflict in profound ways. However, the existing literature on coercive sanctions does not provide an in-depth notion of conflict transformation. Thus, there is neither a concept of conflict transformation, nor do existing conceptions consider how sanctions would relate to such a process.
Generally, theory-oriented investigations into coercive international sanctions, which seek to account for cooperation or non-cooperation, approach the subject by focusing on a specific level of analysis, either from a top-down perspective aimed at explaining outcomes through interaction between states, or using a bottom-up logic aimed at explaining conflict outcomes by disaggregating the domestic politics of target states. Thus, some approaches have explored in depth the impact of relations between on the one hand the entities that engage in coercive sanctions, and the states they are supposed to āconvinceā on the other hand. Usually, they do so in terms of strategic considerations of states as utility-maximizing rational actors, assuming that, in face of coercion, the target is in a position to choose to comply. In turn, other investigations attribute causes for the development of sanctions conflicts to domestic processes, particularities and interplay of interests. These investigations have contributed to a growing knowledge of the effects of sanctions. They help to appreciate the complexity of sanctions as coercive instruments in international conflict.
Despite these achievements, researchers still struggle to account for the development of international sanctions conflicts. The contributions from both perspectives shed light on a complex conflict reality of which sanctions are a part, but also reveal their mutual limitations. Both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives enable us to identify significant elements that contribute to the development of sanctions conflicts. What matters is how the adversaries conceive of their mutual conflict, as well as the influence of sanctions on domestic politics. Yet, connections are not made between these insights. Instead, existing conceptualizations draw boundaries around processes in a problematic way, effectively black-boxing either the international or the domestic.
Artificial analytic boundaries encourage us to consider sanctions external to how agents conceive of conflict. Conflict relations between a āsenderā of international sanctions and a ātargetā are considered exogenous to interaction itself; actors, their perceptions of conflict and sanctions, and their preferences are taken for granted. The core of the problem with conventional approaches to international sanctions lies in their utilization of economistic models that incorporate a simplistic sender-receiver model of communication. Effectively adopting the sendersā perspective, such models are based on the assumption that coercive sanctions and political demands are unambiguously ātransmittedā to a target state and that economic impact is translated smoothly into political pressure.
These conceptual bases neglect the fundamental contingency of meaning in social relations and remain unable to account for the processes involved in the formation of the political views of adversaries in conflict. The reifications involved in such approaches mean that they omit the dialectical interrelation between the development of conflict and the political meaning that sanctions acquire as part of the social practices which contribute to cooperation and non-cooperation in sanctions conflicts. Coercive sanctions are social facts constructed within evolving international conflicts. The present investigation suggests a conceptualization that sheds light on how sanctions acquire meaning within a dynamically developing international conflict and that specifies the influence of particular sanctions strategies (negative, positive, combined) on conflict transformation.
A different perspective
This study presents a sociological theory of international sanctions conflicts. It develops an approach towards understanding cooperation and non-cooperation based on three premises. First, both coercive sanctions and international conflicts are socially constructed facts. Conflicts do not exist without agents constructing relations of disagreement between each other, nor do coercive sanctions exist without being constructed as actions concerning the position of an opponent.
Second, sanctions, as part of international conflicts, are relational phenomena. Coercive sanctions are relational to the extent that they aim to influence an opponentās policies. However, their meaning is relational as well: Conflict opponents might each conceive of negative or positive sanctions differently, and they might attach a different meaning to sanctions as actions in a mutual conflict.
Third, conflict relations between opponents and the meaning that sanctions acquire are endogenous to each other. On the one hand, the meaning that sanctions acquire as coercive relational phenomena is related to how opponents perceive the mutual conflict. On the other hand, sanctions as coercive instruments influence further conflict development, how opponents construct on-going mutual conflict.
These premises reflect that sanctions do not ātransmitā meaning unambiguously in international conflict. They reflect a research interest into how sanctions, conflicts and adversaries are socially constructed and the influence this has on the prospects of cooperation. Thus the main analytical question of the study is: What are the social conditions within sanctions conflicts that are conducive to either cooperation or non-cooperation? The investigation proceeds along three more specific questions: First, what is the meaning of coercive sanctions as actions concerning the position of an opponent? Second, how are such positions constructed in international conflict? Third, what influence do coercive sanctions have on conflict transformation?
The sociological theory developed here conceptualizes how sanctions acquire meaning as part of dynamically evolving conflict relations. It takes sanctions and the conflicts of which they are a part as discursively constructed, synthetic facts. Sanctions and conflicts are relationally constructed social phenomena. Thus, what is of scientific interest are the social processes involved in the relational formation of the meaning that sanctions and conflicts acquire.
Whether sanctions are conducive to either cooperation or non-cooperation depends on how initiators and addressees construct sanctions within conflict communication. In the analytical model put forward by the sociological theory, coercive sanctions are about decisions on international conflict. There are two sides to constructing sanctions as decisions on mutual conflict. When agents construct sanctions relationally as a decision, sanctions convey a tension in their meaning. On the one hand, sanctions raise costs or offer benefits linked to a particular political position, reflecting a utility rationale. On the other hand, sanctions aim to impose their initiatorās decision regarding the conflict on an addressee, reflecting a power rationale.
Sanctions do not occur in a relational vacuum but as part of an on-going conflict. Conflicts as rela...
