This book examines sanctions as a political tool of influence and evaluates the efficacy of sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU) against countries from the early 1990s to present day.

The European Union has devoted growing attention to sanctions since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. In total, the Council has imposed Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) sanctions targeting countries, economic sectors, groups, individuals and entities on 27 different occasions. The novelty in the area of sanctions is that targets are not only states, as in the recent cases of Iran and Syria, but they are also individuals and non-state entities, e.g. anti-terrorist lists, President Robert Mugabe and his associates, and several companies connected with the military junta in Burma/Myanmar. Additionally, the contexts in which sanctions are utilised can be diverse, ranging from the protection of human rights to crisis management and non-proliferation. Despite the fact that the effectiveness of sanctions has been much debated, the EU has developed a sanctioning policy and intensified its adoption of sanctions. Sanctions were traditionally seen as a way to impose economic penalties as a means of extracting political concessions from targets, but EU sanctions do not always impose a cost nor do they always seek to induce behavioural change. To this extent, a new narrative may be needed.

The effectiveness of sanctions cannot purely be measured by the way they change the behaviour of their intended target. The degree to which sanctions constrain a rogue state's behaviour and the signals they send to future targets should also be prime considerations. In this thought provoking book Francesco Giumelli measures the true effectiveness of EU sanctions against a range of states including Belarus, Zimbabwe, Moldova, Uzbekistan, the USA and China. He demonstrates that focussing purely on behavioural change is limiting, especially when considering the actions and motivations of an international organisation, and develops a process to evaluate the direct and indirect impact of EU sanctions. Giumelli demonstrates the many different ways sanctions have been used by the EU to produce positive direct and indirect results and provides a multi-level framework to assess the success of sanctions in the future.

The costs of military ventures and concern for human rights has increased the importance of international sanctions in the twenty fist century, but our knowledge is still limited in this area. The United Nations sanctions on Libya, Al Qaeda and Rwanda, or the European Union restrictive measures on the US, Transnistria and Uzbekistan are sparsely covered by the media and attempts to measure the effectiveness of any of these sanctions comes up against the fundamental (unanswered) question: What can sanctions do and when? This book undertakes an innovative approach that overcomes these problems by enhancing our understanding of how sanctions work and by explaining what we can expect from their imposition. Through the analysis of the sanctioning experience of the United Nations and the European Union after the Cold War, the investigation tests a comprehensive theoretical model and concludes that the context in which sanctions are imposed is a crucial element in deciding the type of sanctions adopted. Giumelli shakes the pre-constituted conceptions that we have on sanctions and sets the terms for more constructive debates in the future.

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

In recent years, the international community has increasingly come to abandon the use of comprehensive sanctions in favour of targeted sanctions. Unlike adopting a coercive strategy on entire states, actors like the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) have come to resort to measures that are aimed at individuals, groups and government members. Targeted sanctions involve adopting measures such as asset freezes, travel bans, commodity sanctions, as well as arms embargoes. Eriksson argues that recent changes in the practice of sanctions from comprehensive to targeted sanctions requires a new way of understanding international sanctions practice. Not only do we need to rethink our methodology to assess recent practice, but also to rethink the very theory of sanctions. This valuable new perspective provides recent thinking on targeted sanctions, trends in practice and unique case studies for evaluation. Based on substantial research, this is a must-read for students, scholars and practitioners interested in international politics.