Coercion, Risk, and Danger

The most notorious question raised in the literature on coercive international sanctions is: 'Do sanctions work?' Unsurprisingly, answers to such a sweeping question remain inconclusive. However, in crucial cases even coercive sanctions’ widely presumed logic of economic impact translating into political pressure is not the primary driver of conflict developments. Despite having been exposed in the 1990s to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, Iraq never seriously acquiesced to political demands. In other cases, coercive sanctions had a different, no less puzzling impact: Sanctions against Serbia in the late 1990s transformed the conflict, re-defining interests and conflict expectations, effectively changing basic premises that many rationalist-positivist approaches treat as exogenously given. Furthermore, the literature widely neglects one of the most striking differences across sanctions conflicts, the occurrence of positive sanctions or their combination with negative sanctions, implicitly taking them as logically indifferent. Instead of asking whether sanctions work, this study addresses a more basic question: How do coercive international sanctions work, and more substantially, what are the social conditions within sanctions conflicts that are conducive to either cooperation or non-cooperation? The study argues that coercive sanctions and international conflicts are socially constructed facts. The meaning of sanctions is not pre-given, nor does it unequivocally ‘transmit’ a cost/benefit logic of economic impact translating into political pressure in international conflict. Thus, of interest are the social processes involved in the formation of meaning that sanctions and conflicts acquire. The study develops a constructivist model of coercive sanctions in a dynamically evolving international conflict. The model focuses upon securitization processes involved in conflict transformation as decisive influence for prospects of cooperation and non-cooperation. It suggests a dialectical interrelation between the development of conflicts and the meaning that sanctions acquire within them. On the one hand, whether sanctions are conducive either to cooperation or non-cooperation depends on how agents construct them in on-going conflict. On the other hand, negative sanctions, positive sanctions, or the combination of both contribute differently to how agents construct conflict and to its potential transformation. Given these crucial social processes, any efforts to ‘predict’ the political effectiveness of sanctions based on their economic impact are premature. The study is of a theory-generating nature and it makes three contributions. First, it subscribes to a ‘communicative turn’ in International Relations and introduces a notion of sanctions relationally constructed as decisions in mutual conflict, in order to shed light upon the conditions of possibility for cooperation in coercive sanctions conflicts. Second, the study seeks to contribute to the further conceptual development of securitization. It introduces a re-interpretation of securitization based on a pragmatist notion of agency as a particular engagement with contingency. Furthermore, it posits securitization as a causal mechanism in sanctions conflicts. Finally, the study presents an empirical analysis of the construction of coercive sanctions in the conflict between China and Taiwan, illustrating how negative sanctions, positive sanctions, and their combination contributed distinctly to conflict development and cooperation prospects.