ABSTRACT
The use of sanctions as an instrument of statecraft can be dated back to ancient times. Reference can be found, for instance, in Thucydides classic history of the Peloponnesian War to a trade boycott imposed by Athens against Sparta’s ally Megara.1 Notwithstanding this long history, sanctions only became the subject of serious empirical inquiry during the second half of the twentieth century. The bulk of the research undertaken during the ensuing period has generally been driven by three overarching questions. First, why do policymakers use sanctions? Second, how ‘effective’ or otherwise are these tools of statecraft? Third, when are sanctions most and least likely to be ‘effective?’ As Kim Nossal has observed, ‘disagreements on these general issues have generated much of the debate in the literature, a debate, it should be noted, that tends to be echoed in the political realm by both governors and the governed.’2 Against that backdrop, this chapter reviews the already voluminous sanctions scholarship as it relates to these three fundamental questions.
