Sanctions

Types of Sanctions

Most commonly, the term sanctions is used to mean economic sanctions—the actual or threatened use of monetary means by states or international organizations to impose costs in order to achieve goals in international politics. For example, the European Union (EU) threatened to impose tariffs on U.S. goods entering the EU to try to force the U.S. government to reduce subsidies to U.S. steel producers, which were giving them an advantage against EU steel producers. Changes in economic sanctions reflect changes in global governance. First, economic sanctions are increasingly imposed by international organizations such as the World Trade Organization. This can and does impose financial penalties on states for violating international trade rules. Second, global neoliberalism is reducing the scope states have for the use of economic sanctions. Global neoliberalism is theoretically aimed at eliminating barriers to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. Some see it in practice as tending to prioritize the advantages of powerful, tax-subsidized corporations: Others maintain that it is promoting the spread of prosperity. Either way, it can run counter to the desire of states to pursue political goals through sanctions, as these by definition involve restrictions on the corporate pursuit of profit.

Inflicting economic costs—such as sinking a ship full of commercial goods—is not normally defined as an economic sanction. Sanctions take many forms, such as tariffs (that is, taxes on imports from the target), boycotts (refusal to buy or accept a particular category or amount of item), embargoes (refusal to sell or provide something), freezing of assets, fines, exclusion from bidding for contracts, or cuts in aid. Sometimes the line between sanctions and other policy instruments can be blurred, as in the phrase economic warfare, which is usually associated with comprehensive economic sanctions. These involve the use of monetary means to impose extremely high levels of economic cost, sometimes with the aim of undermining the target state's military capabilities or [Page 850]bringing about the collapse or overthrow of the government ruling it. This is akin to medieval siege warfare. It is the exception to the general perception that sanctions fall between diplomatic persuasion and military force. The economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations between 1990 and 2003 combined with the effects of war and the Iraqi government's prioritization of its own elite produced devastating effects. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) calculated that there were 500,000 excess deaths among children under five between 1991 and 1998 alone. This case contributed to a debate over smart sanctions, that is, sanctions that target political leaders to provide maximum political effectiveness and minimum costs for the population of a state. For some, the phrase “smart sanctions” was a means of producing political cover for the continuation of the highly damaging sanctions on Iraq with only minor modifications. For others, the phrase signified a real search for more humane and more effective instruments of foreign policy.

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