Sanctions: The Effectiveness Of Non-Targeted Sanctions

The international community has been using economic sanctions for decades to change some undesirable behavior of target states in a way favorable to sender states. However, a number of cases in which economic sanctions were imposed comprehensively called into question the effectiveness of sanctions in general.
Iraqi case of comprehensive sanctions imposition revealed the sanctions crisis and put on the agenda three substantial and overlapping issues. First, comprehensive sanctions inflict wide humanitarian damage on mass public. Sanctions imposed on Iraq “… have contributed to more deaths than all WMD throughout history” (Mueller and Mueller 1999, 50). Second, non-targeted sanctions are used as a tool of political blame of senders. In Iraqi case, “Baghdad was quite successful in blaming the UN for the humanitarian crisis…, both within the country
First, targeted sanctions minimize the comprehensive suffering of mass public since they are particularly aimed at domestic actors responsible for policies that sender side intend to change. Second, since mass public is out of focus in targeted sanctions imposition, such type of sanctions are ethical from human rights perspective.
In terms of third problem generated by non-targeted sanctions, however, there is lack of even moderate agreement between scholars and policymakers. Namely, there is an ardent debate over the relative effectiveness of targeted sanctions versus non-targeted ones, which insofar have created far more heat than light. Given that the use of targeted sanctions as a foreign policy tool dramatically increased in recent decades, and probably will continue to grow, at the expense of non-targeted sanctions, it is essential to investigate conditions under which targeted sanctions do