Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work

Pape, Robert A.

doi:10.2307/2539368

Cited by 237 publications

(242 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

227

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Growth is the moving average of growth in the previous two years. 25 We also control for the possibility that sanctions are the result of a conflict or that they are applied to support foreign military intervention (Pape 1997). Hence, we include a dummy ''foreign war'' which indicates whether the country is a belligerent in an inter-state war.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers1

Escribà‐Folch¹,

Wright²

2010

International Studies Quarterly

193

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines whether economic sanctions destabilize authoritarian rulers. We argue that the effect of sanctions is mediated by the type of authoritarian regime against which sanctions are imposed. Because personalist regimes and monarchies are more sensitive to the loss of external sources of revenue (such as foreign aid and taxes on trade) to fund patronage, rulers in these regimes are more likely to be destabilized by sanctions than leaders in other types of regimes. In contrast, when dominant single-party and military regimes are subject to sanctions, they increase their tax revenues and reallocate their expenditures to increase their levels of cooptation and repression. Using data on sanction episodes and authoritarian regimes from 1960 to 1997 and selection-corrected survival models, we test whether sanctions destabilize authoritarian rulers in different types of regimes. We find that personalist dictators are more vulnerable to foreign pressure than other types of dictators. We also analyze the modes of authoritarian leader exit and find that sanctions increase the likelihood of a regular and an irregular change of ruler, such as a coup, in personalist regimes. In single-party and military regimes, however, sanctions have little effect on leadership stability.During his inaugural address in 2005, US President George W. Bush proclaimed that ''it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.'' 2 The general goal of ending tyranny has been shared by many of Western advanced democracies since the end of the Second World War. Yet there is little consensus over the most effective means to promote regime change and democratization.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers1

Escribà‐Folch¹,

Wright²

2010

International Studies Quarterly

193

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As the literature is quick to point out, however, sanctions fail the vast majority of the time. Success rates are estimated to be as high as 30% to as low as 1-2% (Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott, 1990a, b;Pape, 1997Pape, , 1998Elliott, 1998). Although recently, scholars have suggested that assessments of sanction effectiveness ignore those sanctions that are merely threatened but not deployed, hence leading to a bias against sanction effectiveness (Morgan and Miers, 1999;Nooruddin, 2002;Drezner, 2003;Lacy and Niou, 2004).…”

Section: Economic Sanction Threatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China

Drury

2004

Int Studies Perspectives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Leaders use both coercion and engagement as leverage against other nations. Recent literature suggests economic sanctions are more effective than deployed sanctions to attain intended foreign policy goals. This paper examines a case of threatened coercionFthe threat to remove China's most favored nation (MFN) status following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989Fwhere engagement would have produced better human rights in China. We show that the American threats to sanction China were counterproductive, while cooperative statements and MFN renewal proved to have a more beneficial impact on Beijing's human rights policies. This paper suggests that economic sanction threats are not directly linked to China's human rights behaviors. Instead, China uses accommodations to manipulate diplomatic relations with the U.S. As a result, engagement with China would have been a more productive policy when dealing with human rights issues.

show abstract

“…Rarely have they brought down a regime, as one notes after a generation of sanctions on Cuba. 'Smart' sanctionsthose focused on leaders and specific industries -may be more effective, but unless these are very widely supported by other nations, they rarely produce significant concessions (Pape, 1997).…”

Section: Which Means?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Case for Decoupled Armed Interventions

Etzioni

2012

Global Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article suggests that if the humanitarian goals of armed interventions are decoupled from coerced regime change and nation building, they can be carried out effectively and at rather low costs. In addition, the standard for justifying a humanitarian intervention must be set at a high level (to be specified below). We shall see that this high level is justified by strong normative reasons and not merely prudential ones. The thesis for narrowly crafted armed humanitarian interventions is supported in the following pages by showing that a mixture of idealism and hubris drives the West to assume that it can achieve much more, and that its repeated failure to accomplish these expansive goals is leading to calls to avoid armed humanitarian interventions—including those missions whose normative standing is strong and which can be carried out effectively. The observation that nations can employ non lethal (normative and economic) means to promote human rights and democracy further supports the thesis that the use of force should be reserved to large scale saving of life and not to be allowed to morph into coerced regime change, not to mention futile attempts at nation building.

show abstract

Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work

Cited by 237 publications

References 0 publications

Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers1

Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers1

Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China

The Case for Decoupled Armed Interventions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About