ABSTRACT
Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait constituted a blatant challenge to the existing global order. In this chapter, the author explores the Iraq sanctions regime’s political origins, how the ideological conflict about sanctions on Iraq emerged, and what is implied for committee governance. To evaluate the viability of his committee governance hypotheses, he traces four case episodes detailing how the committee dealt with exemption requests to the sanctions regime. In a first episode, the author explores the early conflict over committee practice on foodstuff shipments to Iraq. Second, he examines how the committee developed its practice on humanitarian waivers, exempting medicines, foodstuffs and many other items after the Gulf War. In a third episode, the author takes a quantitative perspective on how the committee decided about the high number of requests received from 1993–1995, using the Iraq Sanctions Committee Decisions Dataset. Finally, he focuses on the committee conflict over requests for waiving humanitarian flights to Iraq.
