Hufbauer and Dubowitz: Do Sanctions Work?
5 Nov 2012
The debate over the utility of economic sanctions is older than Methuselah, or it at least seems that way. While the Wilsonian view of sanctions as a “silver bullet” that international organizations or governments can use to coerce uncooperative regimes has been largely external pagediscredited, the historical record reminds us that certain types of sanctions applied under certain conditions have nevertheless met with some success. Indeed, where sanctions have been multilateral, structured in service to clear goals, and appropriately accompanied by other tools, they have proven to be a useful component of most foreign policy toolboxes, external pageor so it has been argued. This means then that the well-traveled question we pose this week remains fundamentally an open one – do sanctions really work?
Before we delve into positive and negative case studies of this problem in the coming days, we first need to tackle the question directly, which Gary Hufbauer, a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Mark Dubowitz, an Executive Director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, both do from an American foreign policy standpoint. Whereas for Hufbauer sanctions are too often little more than exercises in “feel good” foreign policy, Dubowitz argues that under the right circumstances sanctions can provide a genuine alternative to force and violence.
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Next, Maria Perotta, writing for the Forum for Research on Eastern Europe (FREE), provides us an overview of various types of economic sanctions. She then goes on to argue that the dominant feature of economic sanctions is unpredictability, and that their unforeseen effects usually far outweigh their foreseeable ones – regardless of whether they are considered successful or not. Finally, Maxim Worcester, from our partners at the ISPSW in Berlin, offers another perspective on the question. He concludes that while making generalizations about the effectiveness of sanctions is a hazardous thing to do, we can safely assert that they take time to work and that they rely crucially on the credibility of those who impose them.