Cortright and Lopez (both of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, U. of Notre Dame) follow up on their earlier work The Sanctions Decade by examining some of the UN changes in sanctions design since 1999 and suggesting that still further changes need to be carried out. Noting that it has now become evident that the full-scale strangulation of a national economy fails to produce political compliance. Recent sanctions against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Taylor government in Liberia are seen as a laudable refinement, but a move from seeing sanctions a solely a punishment towards seeing them as also a form of persuasion is recommended. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book examines the application of UN Security Council’s mandatory sanctions since 1946, and, in particular, the regimes adopted for specific types of conflict. It addresses four distinct threats to peace and security: interstate conflicts, intrastate conflicts, norm-breaking states and terrorism.
Marking the 50th anniversary of UN sanctions, this work examines the evolution of sanctions from a primary instrument of economic warfare to a tool of prevention and protection against global conflicts and human rights abuses. The rise of sanctions as a versatile and frequently used tool to confront the challenges of armed conflicts, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, is rooted in centuries of trial and error of coercive diplomacy. The authors examine the history of UN sanctions and their potential for confronting emerging and future threats, including: cyberterrorism and information warfare, environmental crimes, and corruption. This work begins with a historical overview of sanctions and the development of the United Nations system. It then explores the consequences of the superpowers' Cold War stalemate, the role of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the subsequent transformation from a blunt, comprehensive approach to smart and fairer sanctions. By calibrating its embargoes, asset freezes and travel bans, the UN developed a set of tools to confront the new category of risk actors: armed non-state actors and militias, global terrorists, arms merchants and conflict minerals, and cyberwarriors. Section II analyzes all thirty UN sanctions regimes adopted over the past fifty years. These narratives explore the contemporaneous political and security context that led to the introduction of specific sanctions measures and enforcement efforts, often spearheaded for good or ill by the permanent five members of the Security Council. Finally, Section III offers a qualitative analysis of the UN sanctions system to identify possible areas for improvements to the current Security Council structure dominated by the five veto-wielding victors of World War II. This work will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in criminal justice, particularly with an interest in security, as well as related fields such as international relations and political science.
Since the end of the Cold War, economic sanctions have been a frequent instrument of UN authority. Based on more than 200 interviews with officials from both sides, this book aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of UN sanctions in the 1990s.
Nations and international organizations are increasingly using sanctions as a means to achieve their foreign policy aims. However, sanctions are ineffective if they are executed without a clear strategy responsive to the nature and changing behavior of the target. In The Art of Sanctions, Richard Nephew offers a much-needed practical framework for planning and applying sanctions that focuses not just on the initial sanctions strategy but also, crucially, on how to calibrate along the way and how to decide when sanctions have achieved maximum effectiveness. Nephew—a leader in the design and implementation of sanctions on Iran—develops guidelines for interpreting targets’ responses to sanctions based on two critical factors: pain and resolve. The efficacy of sanctions lies in the application of pain against a target, but targets may have significant resolve to resist, tolerate, or overcome this pain. Understanding the interplay of pain and resolve is central to using sanctions both successfully and humanely. With attention to these two key variables, and to how they change over the course of a sanctions regime, policy makers can pinpoint when diplomatic intervention is likely to succeed or when escalation is necessary. Focusing on lessons learned from sanctions on both Iran and Iraq, Nephew provides policymakers with practical guidance on how to measure and respond to pain and resolve in the service of strong and successful sanctions regimes.
The 1990s have been labeled the ‘Sanctions Decade’, since they witnessed an unprecedented intensification of the use of collective non-military enforcement measures, and in particular sanctions, by the post-Cold War reactivated Security Council. This Research Handbook studies the current practice of UN sanctions in international law, their interrelationship with other regimes and substantive areas of law, as well as issues arising from their implementation and application at the domestic level.
Smart Sanctions explores the emerging concept of targeted sanctions and provides a comprehensive framework for new sanctions strategies for the 21st century. It includes essays by experts and analysts from the United Nations community, the European Union, the United States Government, and the academic community. Visit our website for sample chapters!
This book examines how the United Nations Security Council, in exercising its power to impose binding non-forcible measures ('sanctions') under Article 41 of the UN Charter, may violate international law. The Council may overstep limits on its power imposed by the UN Charter itself and by general international law, including human rights guarentees. Such acts may engage the international responsibility of the United Nations, the organization of which the Security Council is an organ. Disobeying the Security Council discusses how and by whom the responsibility of the UN for unlawful Security Council sanctions can be determined; in other words, how the UN can be held to account for Security Council excesses. The central thesis of this work is that states can respond to unlawful sanctions imposed by the Security Council, in a decentralized manner, by disobeying the Security Council's command. In international law, this disobedience can be justified as constituting a countermeasure to the Security Council's unlawful act. Recent practice of states, both in the form of executive acts and court decisions, demonstrates an increasing tendency to disobey sanctions that are perceived as unlawful. After discussing other possible qualifications of disobedience under international law, the book concludes that this practice can (and should) be qualified as a countermeasure.
