Financial Sanctions Effectiveness as a Foreign Policy Tool on Crises Management

Katerina Psomopoulou

doi:10.12681/hapscpbs.29505

Abstract

Post-Cold War financial sanctions utilization reached its peak as policymakers employed used them in order to face address major international crises. Their prominence among foreign policy instruments sparked the interest of many scholars and enriched the existing literature. However, their attractiveness raises several interesting research questions, such as "Do targeted sanctions suffice to achieve the defined objectives?", "Which variables affect their effectiveness?", "What shortcomings can be overcomed to make them more productive?" To probe these queries, in this paper different aspects of both comprehensive and financial/ smart/ targeted sanctions are examined. It is concluded that political will and better understanding of their effects is needed to improve sanctions design and overcome legal and administrative obstacles, since the current flaws are not incurable.

Highlights

Since the end of the Cold War era, sanctions have emerged as one of the most important and widely used tools of economic statecraft in international politics (Neuenkirch & Neumeier, 2015)
As Weiss (1999) claims, the explosion of post – Cold War sanctions cases is affiliated with three main reasons
The core of sanction’s theory is that the restrictive measures use economic means to achieve a political objective and by no means do they have an economic motivation, as the EU’s “Guidelines on implementation and evaluation of restrictive measures in the framework of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy” declares (Giumelli, 2010: 88). This view has been shared by Write (1955: 239), who notes “Politics may be an instrument of economics and economics may be an instrument of politics”

Summary

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War era, sanctions have emerged as one of the most important and widely used tools of economic statecraft in international politics (Neuenkirch & Neumeier, 2015). As Weiss (1999) claims, the explosion of post – Cold War sanctions cases is affiliated with three main reasons. Sanctions fall within the scope of coercive economic measures that are employed by an international actor (state, group of states, international organization) against another international actor (state, group of states, terrorist group etc). They can be used either as a preventative action or as an answer

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Findings

Objectives