ABSTRACT
This chapter examines targeted sanctions as part of a larger strategic logic. It explains several constraining and enabling factors contributing to shaping this policy's strengths and weaknesses. Rules of the game enabling targeted sanctions might include components such as intent, resolve, goals, investments, signalling, preparedness, rationale, sophistication, follow-up, capabilities, commitment and sacrifice. The chapter touches to a need today to rethink the very contemporary conceptualisation in the literature of the sanctions 'case'. More specifically, the issue is how to define and methodologically assess sanctions within such an analytical construct. It presents an alternative approach to how to conceptualise a sanctions case. This new approach allows for comparisons that are more systematic across such cases, as well as within these sanctions regimes. It introduces the idea of 'sanctions episodes' and explores how such episodes play into our understanding of targeted sanctions. Crawford and Klotz have offered the closest explanation to such a refined understanding of sanctions episodes accounting for sender-target interaction.
