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Publisher's note: North Korea is experiencing yet another cycle of humanitarian distress. While sanctions are not the primary cause, they are a contributing factor. This essay examines the channels through which sanctions affect the North Korean economy and reaches four conclusions: First, sanctions have contributed to a deterioration of economic performance. Second, the UNSC's 1718 Sanctions Committee should consider a thorough review to identify goods that would warrant blanket humanitarian financial sanctions have raised the risk premium on all financial transactions with North Korea; the sanctioning authorities need to do a better job of clarifying transactions permissible under humanitarian exemptions. Finally, while the global community should reassess its policies, the government of North Korea bears responsibility as well. The benefits of sanctions relief will be diminished if North Korea refuses to engage constructively with the international community on a broader range of issues running from basic humanitarian relief to economic reform.
Publisher's note: Although the literature is increasingly interested in the parliamentary dimension of EU foreign policy, to this point no research has covered the role of parliamentarians in EU sanctions policy. This article argues that parliamentarians were successful in keeping the issue of a human rights sanctions regime on the EU's agenda and used all the tools at their disposal to push the EU foreign policy-making machinery in the direction of adopting a new sanctions regime. This article does not limit itself to the study of the European Parliament but argues that parliamentary assemblies of different levels (national, cross-level and European) are interconnected and worked together intensively on the adoption of the EU's human rights sanctions regime.
Publisher's note: In the wake of unsettling conflicts and democratic backsliding, states and organisations increasingly respond with sanctions. The European Union (EU) is one of them: Brussels makes use of the entire toolbox in its foreign policy, and its sanctions appear in different forms--diplomatic measures, travel bans, financial bans, or various forms of economic restrictions. Yet, there is little debate between different strands in the literature on EU sanctions, in particular concerning measures under the Common Foreign and Security Policy and those pertaining to the development and trade policy fields. Our thematic issue addresses this research gap by assembling a collection of articles investigating the design, impact, and implementation of EU sanctions used in different realms of its external affairs. Expanding the definition of EU sanctions to measures produced under different guises in the development, trade, and foreign policy fields, the collection overcomes the compartmentalised approach characterising EU scholarship.
Publisher's note: The implementation of European Union (EU) policies has been investigated for several policy areas, but Decisions made under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) have rarely been considered. While many CFSP measures are appli‐ cable throughout the EU without the need for further action on the domestic level, some Decisions must be implemented by Council Regulations. These Council Regulations adopted with the intent to implement CFSP Decisions have qualities of Directives, which delegate implementing tasks to member states and require transposition. The aim of this article is to investigate whether restrictive measures imposed by the EU are uniformly implemented across the member states, and, if not, to what extent implementation performance varies. We observe significant differences in implementation perfor‐ mance across member states. The findings of this article are twofold. First, we claim that implementation and compliance studies should involve CFSP decisions more systematically. Second, empirical confirmation is provided of how uneven trans‐ position and application occurs also in CFSP matters. This study is based on empirical work that consisted of desk research and semi‐structured interviews with national competent authorities of 21 EU member states taking place between March 2020 and January 2021.
Publisher's note: The European Union (EU) states in its 2016 Global Strategy that it intends to be a “responsible global stakeholder” and to “act worldwide to address the core causes of war and poverty, as well as to promote the indivisibility and universal‐ ity of human rights” (European Union Global Strategy, 2016, pp. 5–8, 18). However, the Global Strategy is silent on the credentials or prerequisites that give the EU the authority to act globally and address conflicts and violations of human rights, including through the use of sanctions against non‐EU states. How far the EU has the authority to use sanctions, which are essentially coercive measures, is especially relevant when the EU resorts to unilateral sanctions based on obli‐ gations owed erga omnes, namely measures without explicit United Nations Security Council authorisation and based on obligations owed to the international community as a whole. Drawing on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, this article introduces an analytical framework—the “moral dimension” of EU authority—which maps the substantive and procedural standards to guide the assessment of whether the EU has the appropriate credentials to qualify as an author‐ ity with the right to intervene forcibly into the internal affairs of non‐EU states. The analytical value of the framework is examined empirically in the case study of the EU’s restrictive measures (sanctions) imposed in response to state violence against anti‐government protests in Uzbekistan in 2005.
Publisher's note: The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.
Publisher's note: The European Union (EU) has been using economic sanctions both as a foreign policy tool and as a liberal alternative to military action. Since 2006, it has been implementing general sanctions against the whole economy of Iran, affecting their trade relations, and since 2007, following the imposition of sanctions by the UN Security Council, it has also been using smart sanctions targeting Iranian entities and natural persons associated with the country's military activities. In a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, this paper investigates the impact of general and targeted EU sanctions against Iran on quarterly bilateral trade values between the 19 members of the euro area (EA19) and Iran between the first quarter of 1999 and the fourth quarter of 2018. In a robustness NARDL specification, trade between Iran and the 28 members of the EU is analysed. In addition, a gravity model of bilateral trade between Iran and the EU member states is run in a robustness check. The results indicate that the EU's general sanctions have strongly hampered trade flows between the two trading partners in almost all sectors, except for the primary sectors. Furthermore, our study finds that the impact of smart sanctions targeting Iranian entities and natural persons is much smaller than the impact of general sanctions on total trade values and the trade values of many sectors. Smart sanctions affect the exports of most sectors from the EA19 and the EU28 to Iran, while they are statistically insignificant for the imports of many sectors from Iran. Thus, this paper provides evidence of the motivations behind smart sanctions, which target specific individuals and entities rather than the whole economy, unlike general sanctions, which have a negative impact on ordinary people.
Publisher's note: This study examines the effect of intensifying economic sanctions against Iran on speed of adjustment (SOA) in firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange during 2001–2018. We find evidence that firms adjust their leverage toward the target at a lower speed in high-intensity sanctions than low-intensity sanctions. Moreover, we indicate that the negative impact of the intensification of sanctions on SOA is stronger for politically connected firms than other firms. Our results are robust to an alternative set of leverage determinants, two alternative definitions for sanctions intensity, an alternative measure for political connections, and an alternative two-step process for hypotheses testing.
Publisher's note: The decisions to impose sanctions on Russia and to lift them on Iran, in opposition to the wishes of the United States, contributed to the elevation of the profile of the European Union among the main global actors in international politics. However, the EU imposes sanctions since the spring of 1994, shortly after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. Even though the EU consequently has 26 years of experience herewith, EU sanctions have been mostly studied only on a case-by-case basis. The aim of this article is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the experience of the EU with sanctions. Specifically, it presents the results of a newly constructed database of EU autonomous sanctions constituted by 48 cases of these restrictive measures, which have been subdivided in 85 episodes. The analysis revolves around four questions that we asked in each case: when sanctions were in force, what type(s) were used, where the targets were located and why restrictive measures were imposed. The analysis of the empirical database leads to observations about the EU as an international actor and, more generally, on the trends vis-à-vis the utilisation of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument.
Publisher`s note: States and regional organizations like the European Union (EU) now cooperate in a variety of policy fields, including environment, trade, justice, and home affairs. Such policy cooperation provides external actors with a catalogue of options for imposing sanctions, meaning that sanctioning is no longer restricted to violations of purely political or economic norms. Noticeably, sectoral norms now play an increasingly large role. However, existing research tends to focus on the ineffectiveness of sanctions as primarily economic-coercion measures, and neglects to investigate also the determinants of the decision to sanction, or not, the violation of any internationally or bilaterally agreed norm. This research agenda argues for a multi-dimensional view on EU sanctioning. Given globalization and increasing transnational cooperation, it identifies the need for scholarship to respond to the externally and internally changing environment of EU policymaking. Based on a discussion of the implications of this transnationalized reality for EU sanctioning, it identifies promising avenues for future research.
Publisher's note: Strategic deterrence through the use of sanctions in the international system is gaining support among major players. This is despite widespread scepticism over the instrument's efficacy, as seen by the widespread opposition to its use immediately following its implementation in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War. The takeover of Ukraine is the first opportunity since World War II to analyse the results of sanctions on a major power and permanent member of the UN Security Council. The issue raises the question of whether or not sanctions on Russia would be an effective strategy in stopping their aggressiveness in Ukraine. In this article, we analyse how targeted sanctions against Russia's economy can alter the course of the conflict in Ukraine.
Publisher's note: This article studies the case of the sanctions against the Russian war on the Ukraine in 2022 against the background of four major and well-documented historical sanction episodes: (1) the anti-Apartheid sanctions of the 1980s, (2) the sanctions against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, (3) the sanctions against Iranian nuclear capabilities and (4) the US and EU sanctions against the Russian annexation of the Crimea. Two cases (South Africa and Iran) have a comparatively low probability of success based on pre-sanction trade linkage between sender and target and the target’s regime type (the autocracy score). The key to understanding their success is in the banking channel (debt-crisis and international payment system sanctions) and the behaviour of the private sector (divestment and over-compliance). The failure of the sanctions against Iraq underscores the importance of regime type and the need for a viable exit strategy and shows that some decision-makers cannot be influenced with economic hardship. The 2014 sanctions against Russia illustrate the comparative vulnerability of the European democracies and their weakness in organizing comprehensive sanctions that bite. Given the increased Russian resilience, the increasingly autocratic nature of President Putin’s government, the credibility of his 2014 tit-for-tat strategy and the failure of European democracies to implement appropriate strong and broad-based measures, smart and targeted sanctions are unlikely to influence the Kremlin’s calculus. The European Union could only influence that calculus by restoring its reputation as a credible applicant of strong sanctions, including an embargo on capital goods and a boycott of Russian energy.
Publisher's note: This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on the use of sanctions as a coercive tool of international policymaking, focusing on the economic effects of the sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Using CGE modelling, we explore the short- to medium-term economic effects of a possible trade embargo by Allied countries imposed on Russia. We consider the Allied trade embargo as a set of comprehensive trade sanctions that include (i) import-related measures, (ii) export-related measures, (iii) FDI-related measures and (iv) increased trade costs between Russia and non-Allies. We find that Russia would sustain sizable losses upwards of 14% of real GDP from an Allied trade embargo, even in the short run. Allied economies are unevenly affected by the sanctions, with real GDP losses between 0.1% and 1.6%. Non-Allied economies benefit from some trade diversion but experience even larger losses from the increased costs of trading and doing business with Russia. China joining the embargo resulted in greater economic losses for Russia; Allied economies and China would be adversely affected by this move. Finally, Russia would suffer significantly higher losses if it were enacting countersanctions, rather than resigning itself to being a sanction target.
Publisher's note: The research features the theoretical (legal) and practical aspects of EU’s export control over the dual-use goods circulation as a sanction measure against Russia in 2014–2022. It gives a brief overview of the common EU approach to the dualuse goods export control. The authors focus on the special sanctions regime against Russia in this sphere, i.e., its legal basis, content, development, and implementation. The article introduces a comparative analysis of restrictions in the sphere of dual-use goods circulation before and after the tightening of EU sanctions in February-March 2022. The theory is illustrated by several court cases against individuals suspected of violating the sanctions regime. Based on the available EU statistics for 2013–2021, the authors analyzed the impact of the sanctions on cooperation between the EU and Russia in the sphere of dual-use goods export. Restrictive measures in the sphere of export control are a unique case of using Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) instruments in the context of implementing the principles of the EU Common Commercial Policy (CCP).
Publisher's note: Why did transatlantic policymakers target Russia with economic sanctions in response to its actions during the Ukraine conflict? Commentators perceived these sanctions as highly unlikely because they would have high costs for several European countries, and were surprised when they were finally adopted. Constructivist scholars employed explanations based on common norms and trust to explain the European Union’s agreement on economic sanctions in this case. I argue that the mechanism of international emotional resonance played a decisive role in altering the course of the United States and core European Union powers’ cooperation. A framework that combines resonance with emotional influence mechanisms of persuasion and contagion explains the precise timing of the policy shift, why European policymakers accepted sanctions at a substantial cost to their economy and how norms affected policy when they were empowered by intense emotions.
Publisher`s note: The article presents a new perspective to analyse agreements in EU sanctions policy. It presents arguments on how negotiations on sanctions in both the European Council and the Council should be analysed, using the example of restrictive measures imposed against Russia. The paper recognizes that the European Council has become a key decision-maker in EU sanctions policy since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. EU Heads of State and Government are more involved than ever in day-to-day sanctions policy. Further, the article shows that two different mechanisms were present during negotiations on Russian sanctions. While the European Council was largely influenced by norms when agreeing on sanctions, the members of the Council bargained with each other and adopted a decision which reflects the red lines of the Member States.
Publisher's note: Economic sanctions impose costs on sender as well as target states, and those costs increase with the degree of interdependence between the states in question. We test the hypothesis that EU member states that are more economically interdependent with Russia would be the most opposed to the imposition of sanctions on Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine in 2013–2014. However, an analysis of the debate over the imposition of sanctions shows the opposite: a modest positive correlation between economic interdependence and support for the sanctions among EU member states. This finding further calls into question the fundamental linkage between economic self-interest and conflict avoidance among interdependent states.
Publisher's note: Governments frequently use economic sanctions to influence or undermine the political actions or regimes of other countries. This case study of the economic sanctions imposed by the European Union on the Russian Federation in response to the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula serves as an illustrative example that provides new, in-depth insights into the implications of economic sanctions for international trade patterns and global trade dynamics. We conclude that sanctions negatively affect bilateral trade between the sanctioner and the target country, and that sanctions constrain the target country’s integration into the global economy.
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