Economic Sanctions as a Policy Instrument

Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms

“…Considering their effectiveness, scholars ask a fundamental question: Do economic sanctions really work? Despite the increasing use of international economic sanctions, conventional wisdom-based on both case studies and large-N empirical research-holds that economic sanctions are generally ineffective and that they fail to induce a target to change its behavior (e.g., Galtung 1967;Wallensteen 1968;Barber 1979;Baldwin 1985;Haas 1997;Pape 1997). Research shows that among others factors, economic sanctions are more likely to succeed if target countries are economically dependent on the target (Hufbauer et al 1990;Drury 1998), if sanctions inflict serious economic damage on the target (Tsebelis 1990), if sanctions aim at the political elites of the target countries (Morgan and Schwebach 1997;Kirshner 1997;Kaempfer and Lowenberg 1988), and if there is no expectation of future conflict between the target and sender countries (Drezner 1998).…”

Challenges in evaluating impact of sanctions – political vs economic perspective

“…Despite plethora of studies regarding the effectiveness of economic sanctions in the last two decades, the mixed results of the various studies in the field show that political scientists seem to show lack of consensus regarding the usefulness of this foreign policy tool (Wallensteen, 1968(Wallensteen, , 2000Doxey, 1971;Knorr, 1975;Barber, 1979;Olson, 1979;Kaempfer, Lowenberg, 1988, 1992Pape, 1997). This mixed results could lie in the way the scholars define "success" of sanctions and how they measure this concept.…”

“…For more than two decades political scientists debate over the effectiveness of economic pressure (Barber, 1979;Drury, 1998;Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott, 1990;Kaempfer, Lowenberg, 1988;Marinov, 2005). A substantial part of research on economic sanctions focuses on sanction effectiveness and the conditions under which they are likely to achieve their intended policy objectives.…”

National Interests and International Commitments: the Problem of Enforcing Sanctions

“…49 That statements (sometimes overstatements) in public forums are not enough to guarantee the effectiveness of collective action is a logical deduction. National commitment has to be great on international issues.…”