Systematically analyzes the impacts and the effectiveness of UN targeted sanctions over the past quarter century.

NSIAD-92-106 Economic Sanctions: Effectiveness as Tools of Foreign Policy

What cannot be disputed is that economic sanctions are increasingly at the center of American foreign policy: to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promote human rights, discourage aggression, protect the environment, and thwart drug trafficking.

Since the end of the Cold War, economic sanctions have been a frequent instrument of UN authority. Based on more than 200 interviews with officials from both sides, this book aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of UN sanctions in the 1990s.

Economic Sanctions are increasingly used as a legal, non-military technique of combating abusers of international peace. However it remains unclear how the success or failure of these sanctions is measured. This book examines the seldom-explored United Nations’ economic sanctions deliberation process and exposes systematic problems in the measurement of the success or failure of these sanctions. Centering on the key concepts of "peace and security," the author brings the reader’s attention to the discrepancies that exist in the process of decision-making, implementation, and evaluation of UN imposed economic sanctions. She engages international law and development methods to provide proof for the lack of consensus in measures of success and failure, which in turn suggests that sanction implementation on a uniform domestic front are unattainable. This thorough analysis concludes with suggestions for improving the sanctions process, only to clear the path for negating them as a whole and suggest alternative non-coercive measures for mitigating conflict situations and threats to peace and security.