The Success of Sanctions

Lessons Learned from the EU Experience

Francesco Giumelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317014645
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The effectiveness of sanctions cannot purely be measured by the way they change the behaviour of their intended target. The degree to which sanctions constrain a rogue state's behaviour and the signals they send to future targets should also be prime considerations. In this thought provoking book Francesco Giumelli measures the true effectiveness of EU sanctions against a range of states including Belarus, Zimbabwe, Moldova, Uzbekistan, the USA and China. He demonstrates that focussing purely on behavioural change is limiting, especially when considering the actions and motivations of an international organisation, and develops a process to evaluate the direct and indirect impact of EU sanctions. Giumelli demonstrates the many different ways sanctions have been used by the EU to produce positive direct and indirect results and provides a multi-level framework to assess the success of sanctions in the future.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Measuring the Effectiveness of Sanctions

The use of sanctions in foreign affairs dates back to antiquity. Political communities, city-states, empires and nation-states have always resorted to some form of sanctions in order to craft their relations with other actors. Although history provides us with plenty of empirical evidence that has helped us to deepen our understanding of sanctions, the questions regarding their success remain largely unresolved. Scholars and practitioners would give vague replies to the question ‘Do sanctions work?’ and studies have fallen short in reaching definitive conclusions, both on the effectiveness of sanctions and laying the foundations for a constructive debate among sanctions scholars. This book deals with the issue of effectiveness of international sanctions by creating a procedure for evaluating success that will enhance our theoretical understanding and provide useful insights to practitioners who make decisions about sanctions.

The question of the success of sanctions has proved to be rather problematic. Not only is it difficult to arrive at a general assessment of this specific foreign policy tool, but individual cases present challenges that have prevented experts and pundits from reaching consensus on whether sanctions have succeeded. The United Nations (UN) sanctions on Iraq and Haiti are still debated among some experts, some of whom credited the measures for establishing international norms that constitute the international system today, while others lambasted the Security Council for having approved a policy that only caused more human suffering. The United States (US) embargo on Cuba is another questionable case, since many would have a hard time explaining why sanctions were imposed, even before addressing the question of whether they have succeeded. The UN embargo on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990 has also been at the centre of the discussion, since if it is true that Saddam Hussein did not succeed in rebuilding the Iraqi army and acquiring weapons of mass destruction, it is also true that these results came at the cost of thousands of lives. Even cases from the remote past, such as the League of Nations’ measures on Italy in 1936, are still a matter for debate, but the research in this book maintains that the problem lies more in how success is measured rather than the complexity of the case itself.

The root of the problem is the lack of an agreed common framework, which has hindered the accumulation of knowledge when talking about the success of sanctions. In 1999, Baldwin wrote that ‘scholars are talking past one another because they ask different questions, use different concepts, and set the discussion in different analytical contexts. In short, they are talking about different things’ (Baldwin 1999/2000). This book tackles this problem and provides an analytical framework whereby scholars can talk with one another about the success of sanctions. The aim is not to answer the question of whether sanctions work, but to elaborate a four-step procedure to evaluate sanctions, opening up a long-overdue debate that may have theoretical as well as policy relevance. There is a necessary price to pay for this latter aim, since policy relevance can be obtained through the ordering of analytical instruments that can favour the debate and widen the understanding of sanctions, but without creating a formal model with narrowly defined variables. The sanctions world has resisted excessive processes of simplification, and this research does not intend to contribute to the debate by providing formally perfect, but completely irrelevant, research on sanctions that departs from real-world scenarios. Instead, this book develops a new way of thinking about sanctions that will provide the building blocks for further analysis which will shape and influence the understanding of why sanctions are imposed (George and Bennet 2005, Nincic and Lepgold 2000).

The method of assessing the effectiveness of sanctions is applied to the European Union (EU) with the objective of drawing lessons about the success of sanctions. The activity of the EU has been remarkable in recent years, with restrictive measures1 imposed on targets in 24 different countries and the establishment of three special regimes since the creation of the political union with the Treaty of Maastricht. The list of EU sanctions is long: China (1989), Burma (1991), Afghanistan (1996), Belarus (1999 and 2004), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001 and 2011), Comoros (2008), Côte d’Ivoire (2010), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1993), Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1996 and 1998), Guinea (2009), Guinea-Bissau (2012), Egypt (2011), Indonesia (1999), Iran (2010), Libya (1999 and 2011), Nigeria (1993), Sudan (1994 and 2004), the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (2001), Syria (2011), Transnistria (2003), Tunisia (2011), the United States (1996), Uzbekistan (2005) and Zimbabwe (2002). Besides the sanctions on targets in specific countries, the EU established three worldwide regimes covering individuals and entities involved in international terrorism (2003), the indictees of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (2001) and Milošević and his family (2000). The decision to adopt sanctions as a regular tool contrasts with the dubious evaluations in the sanctions literature questioning their effectiveness (Doxey 1996, Pape 1997, Pape 1998, Cortright and Lopez 2000, Drezner 1999, Knorr 1975), but recent approaches combined with a systematic approach can help us to resolve this puzzle (Cortright and Lopez 2000, Giumelli 2011a).

The recent evolution of sanctions practices from their classical form to ‘targeted’ versions has encouraged the EU to adopt them more frequently, adding degrees of complexity to the problem of assessing their success. Targeted sanctions, also known as ‘smart sanctions’, differ from the classical form of sanctions as they are aimed at non-state actors (individuals, groups or companies for the most part) and/or they are only aimed at specific economic sectors or specific products. The objective is to design the restrictive measures in such a way as to maximize their impact on the actors responsible for wrongdoings, and to minimize the unintended consequences on innocent civilians (Cortright and Lopez 2002). This evolution began in the early 1990s, when the UN sanctions on Iraq and Haiti were accused of causing harm that was greater than that they were meant to combat (Ali and Iqbal 1999, Gibbons 1999).

The four-step process to evaluate the success of sanctions is based on three main principles. First, sanctions are not imposed in isolation from other foreign policy tools, so a case-by-case overview is necessary to discover how sanctions are expected to contribute to the achievement of foreign policy objectives (Vines 2012). Second, from this perspective, sanctioning becomes a power exercise, and as such it can (1) coerce, (2) constrain and (3) signal. These three dimensions reflect the logic of sanctions – namely how sanctions influence their targets.2 Whereas sanctions are often seen as a tool to change the behaviour of targets, this multifaceted understanding ensures that the evaluation of success is more accurate because it accounts for the different ways in which sanctions do matter (Giumelli 2011a). Finally, the third principle is that sanctions obey a logic of choice, in that they are selected under conditions where other foreign policy instruments may not have performed any better than sanctions (Baldwin 1999/2000).

To clarify further the objective of this book, readers should bear in mind a classical work on international relations, Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer (1977), in which Walzer dealt with the problem of deciding when wars can be morally justified. Assuming that conflicts are a necessary evil in human relations, Walzer elaborated seven criteria to evaluate whether conflicts are morally justifiable (Walzer 1977). Given the complexity of the research question and its fundamental political nature, Walzer’s objective was not to measure the ‘justice’ of previous conflicts, but to provide an analytical framework that could be used to reach informed conclusions and to make comparisons of different cases possible. Similarly, although devoid of any moral considerations regarding the use of sanctions and its consequences, the mission of this book should be seen as an attempt to develop criteria that should be applied when assessing the success of sanctions.

The ambition is to identify lessons highlighting a different perspective on what we mean by determining that sanctions have succeeded. The analysis leads to nine lessons that can provide the first steps towards the creation of a checklist for assessing the success of sanctions across time and space. These nine lessons of success emerged from the analysis of six case studies selected from the experience of the EU according to their logic. The four-step methodology includes variables and dimensions that are central to constructive, informative and relevant assessments. In the end, the book argues that sanctions can be extremely useful in foreign policy because they can be used in different contexts, for different reasons, and they can be tailored according to very specific needs. A proper evaluation of their impact within a larger foreign policy strategy yields a complete evaluation of their effectiveness, painting quite a different picture than would result from simply looking at the classical target’s behavioural change. This does not mean that sanctions are always successful, but since this book aims to define success, failure will be mostly left out this investigation and its definition postponed to future research.

Failing Assessments Rather than Failing Sanctions

The quest to understand whether sanctions ‘work’ has endured as long as the existence of sanctions themselves. In 1985, David Baldwin wrote that there are few subjects in political science that achieve greater consensus than the claim that sanctions do not work (Baldwin 1985). In 1999, Daniel Drezner began his interesting contribution to the debate on the success of sanctions by listing several opinions by scholars and practitioners that held that sanctions were ineffective (Drezner 1999). However, this simplification of the debate does not do justice to the number of contributions and the level of discussion that has occurred in recent decades. Sanctions have received a high degree of attention and the record of their effectiveness is mixed given the fact that the criteria used to assess them have varied. In other words, the problem is not to discover whether sanctions are effective, but to decide how effectiveness is to be measured.

The behavioural change criterion has shaped the bulk of empirical research on economic sanctions. What is the behavioural change criterion? Such an approach considers a sanction successful if it is followed by a target’s compliance with the demands of the sanction senders. Otherwise, a sanction is deemed unsuccessful. The adoption of this method splits the debate between sanctions ‘optimists’ and sanctions ‘pessimists’.

The first edition of Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (Hufbauer, Schott and Elliott 1990) challenged the negative view of sanctions that dominated the literature in the 1970s and 1980s. Hufbauer, Schott and Elliott analysed sanctions cases during the twentieth century and concluded that they were successful in 34 per cent of cases. The database was further updated in a later edition published in 2007, but the results confirmed the findings of the previous research (Hufbauer et al. 2007). A one in three success rate may appear modest, but this evidence was gathered during a period in which the perception of the utility of sanctions in foreign policy was negative. Furthermore, Drezner noted that this rate could in fact be a gross underestimate. If sanctions are deemed successful when they are able to change the behaviour of targets, how should we account for sanctions that were threatened but not imposed because of pre-emptive behavioural change on the part of targets? The ‘hidden hand’ of economic coercion is at work even if sanctions are not imposed, therefore the success rate of sanctions is even higher than claimed by Hufbauer et al. (Drezner 2003).

The same empirical dataset was analysed by other scholars who reached the conclusion that sanctions do not work. Even assuming that sanctions do not achieve ‘international political goals’, Robert Pape’s analysis would count only a few cases as ‘successful’ since ‘there is no evidence that the target made the demanded concession’ in the large majority of them (Pape 1997: 93). However, his re-evaluation of the database was also inspired by the behavioural change criterion, which led him to conclude that only 5 out of 115 cases could be seen as successful.

The strict adoption of the behavioural change criterion led to a dichotomic view of sanctions, since if targets do or do not do what has been demanded, then sanctions can either succeed or fail. While modelling in political science should allow for a better understanding of complex phenomena, the real world should not be distorted for the sake of model simplification. The dichotomous approach to the problem of measuring success of international sanctions compromised the analytical utility of this type of study. This fact is also proven by the puzzling act of imposing sanctions over time even if the literature or the common view would say that they do not work (Baldwin 1999/2000).

The problem lies in the criterion of behavioural change and the methods used to reach these assessments, not in the effectiveness of sanctions in themselves. This is the reason why others have attempted to measure success according to whether sanctions achieved specific foreign policy objectives rather than looking at the behavioural change of targets. This goal-driven criterion functions in a similar way to the behavioural change one, but it is based on a different success threshold. If sanctions bring about the achievement of a foreign policy objective, then sanctions are successful. If they do not, then sanctions have failed. The main difference is determined by the fact that sanctions do not always aim to change the behaviour of targets.

This perspective led us to think about sanctions in terms of achieving primary, secondary and tertiary objectives (Barber 1979). Barber held that a list of possible objectives – the protection of the weak against the strong, the reduction of the influence of ruling elites, societal support for the imposition of the measures, the symbolic value of fighting against certain ideologies and the deterrence of similar actions by other actors – could constitute primary objectives ‘which are concerned with the actions and behaviour of the state or regime against whom the sanctions are directed-the “target state”’; secondary objectives ‘relating to the status, behaviour and expectations of the government(s) imposing the sanctions – the “imposing state”’, and tertiary objectives ‘concerned with broader international considerations, relating either to the structure and operation of the international system as a whole to those parts of it which are regarded as important by the imposing states’ (Barber 1979: 270). According to this school of thought, changing the behaviour of targets may be one objective, but not the only one. Lindsay (1986) and Brady (1987) have also thought in these terms. For instance, Lindsay created five categories of objectives according to which ‘success’ is measured: compliance, subversion, deterrence, international symbolism and domestic symbolism (Lindsay 1986). This approach endures in the literature, and has inspired a number of studies focusing on the effectiveness of sanctions on domestic audiences (Fearon 1997, Morgan and Schwebach 1995) and symbolic measures (Schwebach 2000).

Despite the richness of the sanctions debate, there is nothing that resembles a consensus on understanding their success. Baldwin’s opinion presented above reflected the mindset of those who became interested in studying sanctions as they continue to be imposed, while the academic debate was unable to produce a literature to explain and understand this phenomenon. Neither the behavioural change nor the goal-driven approaches provide the analytical utility necessary to enhance the understanding of sanctions through informed comparative analyses. These two methods suffer from four structural deficiencies.

First, the belief that every sanction intends to change the behaviour of its primary target would be misleading on many occasions, as senders do not always use sanctions with the expectation that the target will change its policies. Second, sanctions are assessed under the assumption that targets can change their behaviour voluntarily, but often targets cannot comply with the sanctions imposed since compliance would endanger the target’s political survival – for example, the sanctions on Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi. How could they comply with sanctions if the demand was for them to leave their posts? The case of Qaddafi is even more significant, since leaving his post would have meant being tried by the International Criminal Court. In other words, targets will not do what sanctions demand if their very existence is at stake. The third is the myth according to which sanctions should always impose a cost on their targets, which does not explain why policy-makers sometimes adopt sanctions that deliberately do not impose such costs (usually ‘cost’ refers to economic loss). Finally, the analysis of sanctions does not account for the multiple foreign policy instruments that can be used by senders, such as economic incentives, specific diplomatic initiatives and the use of force. The behavioural change, as well as the achievement of a policy objective, can be attributed to the employment of many foreign policy tools used simultaneously, therefore the analysis of sanctions alone does not yield useful conclusions.

How to Think about Success: A Four-step Process

The measurement of success is a challenging exercise that has steered the debate on sanctions towards a dead end. The current frameworks for understanding and discussing the success of sanctions do not yield conceptual tools that allow different views to engage in the discussion. This situation fails to lay the foundations for the natural enhancement of knowledge that such a process should lead to. This book tackles this gap between practice and theory, reformulating the terms of the discussion to arrive at an alternative way to look at sanctions. This means that a new method to evaluate success is presented here with the objective of learning lessons on effectiveness that can contribute to answering the question of why sanctions are imposed despite the scepticism that surrounds them.

An alternative method for understanding, and therefore measuring, the effectiveness of sanctions is to look at the logic of sanctions, defined as how sanctions aim to influence their targets. The benefits of this approach are twofold. First, there are a limited, and analytically useful, number of ways in which the imposition of sanctions, as well as other foreign policy tools, can affect world events. Instead of looking at long, even potentially infinite, lists of policy goals, a relatively simple typology of logics can facilitate the process of knowledge accumulation. Second, such an approach would help to focus on the effects that sanctions cause or are expected to cause, rather than on the behaviour or the policy objective that senders are attempting to achieve.

‘Sanctions’ is a general term that refers to ‘politically motivated penalties imposed as a declared consequence of the target’s failure to observe international standards or international obligations by one or more international actors (the senders) against one or more others (the targets)’ (Giumelli 2011a: 15–17). This book contributes to the discussion about economic sanctions as well, but it stresses that sanctions are not only economic. In any case, sanctions influence targets through coercing, constraining and signalling logics, and a proper definition of success should encompass which logics are at work and aim to assess their success independently from other foreign policy goals. In other words, we should look for the contribution that sanctions bring to a complex foreign policy strategy (Elliott 1998). In this way, sanctions can contribute to a behavioural change by increasing the cost of all behaviours but one (coercion), sanctions can make the life of targets more difficult by increasing the cost of specific behaviours (constraint) and sanctions can signal disapproval of specific actions without inflicting direct material costs (signalling). The success of sanctions can be determined by the value added on these three dimensions through imposing sanctions versus not imposing them. Bearing this in mind, the evaluation of sanctions should be carried out in four steps.

The first step of the analysis is to place sanctions within the larger foreign policy strate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Measuring the Effectiveness of Sanctions
• The Process
• The Practice
• The Lessons Learned
• Sanctions Cases Classified According to their Logic
• Sanctions Cases Classified According to their Conflict Type
• Sanctions Cases Classified According to their Form
• References
• Index