Economic sanctions
[6] Prominent forms of economic sanctions include trade barriers, asset freezes, travel bans, arms embargoes, and restrictions on financial transactions.
Aiming to cripple the United Kingdom economically, Emperor Napoleon I of France in 1806 promulgated the Continental System—which forbade European nations from trading with the UK.
In practice the French Empire could not completely enforce the embargo, which proved as harmful (if not more so) to the continental nations involved as to the British.
[11] By the time of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, diplomats and legal scholars regularly discussed using coordinated economic pressure to enforce international law.
This idea was also included in reform proposals by Latin American and Chinese international lawyers in the years leading up to World War I.
The Global Sanctions Data Base categorizes nine objectives of sanctions: "changing policy, destabilizing regimes, resolving territorial conflicts, fighting terrorism, preventing war, ending war, restoring and promoting human rights, restoring and promoting democracy, and other objectives.
[23] Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot (2008) argue that regime change is the most frequent foreign-policy objective of economic sanctions, accounting for just over 39 percent of cases of their imposition.
In either case, the difficulty and unexpected nuances of measuring the actual success of sanctions in relation to their goals are both increasingly apparent and still under debate.
In other words, it is difficult to determine why a regime or country changes (i.e., whether it was the sanction or inherent instability) and doubly so to measure the full political effect of a given action.
Veto players represent individual or collective actors whose agreement is required for a change of the status quo, for example, parties in a coalition, or the legislature's check on presidential powers.
"[33] Sanctions have been criticized on humanitarian grounds, as they negatively impact a nation's economy and can also cause collateral damage on ordinary citizens.
[34] Some policy analysts believe that imposing trade restrictions only serves to hurt ordinary people as opposed to government elites,[35][36][37][38] and others have likened the practice to siege warfare.
[42] The term "smart sanctions" refers to measures like asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes that aim to target responsible parties like political leaders and elites with the goal of avoiding causing widespread collateral damage to innocent civilians and neighboring nations.
[42] For example, arms embargoes can impact the self-defense efforts of those under attack, aviation bans can affect a nation's transportation sector and the jobs of civilians associated with them, and financial sanctions targeting individuals raise due process issues.
[45] Properly preparing products for trade, sometimes referred to as an embargo check, is a difficult and timely process for both importers and exporters.
[52][53][54] The United States Embargo of 1807 involved a series of laws passed by the US Congress (1806–1808) during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson.
The United States embargo against Cuba began on March 14, 1958, during the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution.
[61] While taking some steps to allow limited economic exchanges with Cuba, American President Barack Obama nevertheless reaffirmed the policy in 2011, stating that without the granting of improved human rights and freedoms by Cuba's current government, the embargo remains "in the national interest of the United States".
[65] Soon after Yushchenko entered office, Russia demanded Kyiv pay the same rate that it charged Western European states.
[65] Russia subsequently cut off the supply of natural gas in 2006, causing significant harm to the Ukrainian and Russian economies.
Saakashvili wanted to bring Georgia into NATO and the EU and was a strong supporter of the US-led war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For example, the UNSC maintains lists of individuals indicted for crimes or linked to international terrorism, which raises novel legal questions regarding due process.
The most frequently used UNSC sanction documented in the dataset is an embargo against imported weapons, which applied in 87% of all cases and was directed against non-state actors more often than against governments.
[10] The UN implemented sanctions against Somalia beginning in April 1992, after the overthrow of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 during the Somali Civil War.
Professor William Brown of Georgetown University argued that "sanctions don't have much of an impact on an economy that has been essentially bankrupt for a generation".
[73] On February 26, 2011, the UNSC issued an arms embargo against the Libya through Security Council Resolution 1970 in response to humanitarian abuses occurring in the First Libyan Civil War.
The arms embargo was established in the context of an intercommunity conflict between the Séléka rebels, with a Muslim majority, and the predominantly Christian militias.
Deprived of access to vital oil, iron-ore and steel supplies, Japan started planning for military action to seize the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, which required a preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor, triggering the American entry into the Pacific War.
