ABSTRACT
The sanctions debate The scholarly and policy debates on sanctions have traditionally focused primarily on the narrow question of whether sanctions work as a tool of security
governance and achieve their stated policy objective (see Wallensteen 2002). This ongoing debate has almost entirely overshadowed the unintended criminalizing consequences of sanctions and their legacy for the post-sanctions period.5 Although Galtung long ago pointed to smuggling as an effective sanctions evasion method (Galtung 1967: 378-416), the specific dynamics of such evasion and their criminalizing side-effects are rarely made the center of analysis or traced in detail. This is part of the larger tendency in much of the literature to gloss over the political economy of how targeted states strategically cope and adapt to sanctions (notable exceptions are Brooks 2002: 1-50; Crawford and Klotz 1999; Naylor 1999; and Rowe 2001). As Rowe rightly points out, “the central theoretical puzzle posed by economic sanctions, how governments can often survive and even benefit from severe disruptions to the national economy, remains largely unanswered” (Rowe 2001: 6). Unlike most sanctions scholars, policy practitioners are very much focused on problems of evasion, as evident in UN Security Council debates and sanctions implementation manuals (see Wallensteen et al. 2003).6 Nevertheless, the criminalizing impact of sanctions and their longer-term legacy are generally not central policy considerations when officials contemplate their imposition. One reason why the dominant focus in the sanctions literature on the question of whether sanctions work is so unsatisfactory is that it pays inadequate attention to the mechanisms by which sanctions change behavior in the targeted country (see, in particular, Romaniuk 2003). Scholars who stress greater complexity regarding the domestic consequences of sanctions enforcement necessarily have more to say about evasion. For example, Kirshner’s emphasis on the “microfoundations” of sanctions draws attention to the fact that sanctions can have substantial economic effects without producing the intended policy outcome, and it suggests that the analysis of sanctions should be recast to look more closely at how groups within a target state are affected differently by sanctions (Kirshner 1997: 41). Other sanctions scholars, such as Brooks, Rowe, and Selden, also point to the often perverse and unintended distributional effects of sanctions, which create new winners and losers (see Brooks 2002; Rowe 2001; and Selden 1999). These various lines of analysis all point to the utility of broadening the sanctions debate and looking more closely at the political economy of sanctions enforcement and evasion, including their criminalizing consequences. In this regard, the analytical framework developed by Crawford and Klotz for understanding how sanctions work can be usefully modified and extended to identify and categorize the range of potential criminalizing side-effects of sanctions (see Table 5.1) (Crawford and Klotz 1999: 30). There has also been an upsurge of scholarly and policy interest in the unintended negative consequences of sanctions, but this has almost exclusively been interpreted to mean unintended humanitarian consequences. The heightened attention to targeted sanctions reflects these concerns, as the main goal of these sanctions (or “smart sanctions”) is to limit humanitarian damage while retaining effective pressure on the targeted regime. Indeed, this has been the primary motivation for the move away from comprehensive sanctions and toward more
targeted sanctions in recent years (see Wallensteen et al. 2003; also see the website of the Special Program on the Implementation of Targeted Sanctions [SPITS]). But while the criminalizing damage from economic sanctions may be acknowledged or mentioned in passing, this is rarely highlighted in these evaluations (let alone made a central part of the rationale for change in sanctions instruments). Equally important, evaluations of sanctions typically tend to stop at the point of sanctions termination, with sanctions observers quickly turning their attention to other cases. Although this is understandable, it unfortunately overlooks the potentially profound aftereffects of sanctions. In this chapter I evaluate the criminalizing unintended consequences of sanctions through a detailed examination of the political economy of sanctions evasion and their legacy in the case of the FRY. Interestingly, this case tends to be one of the few sanctions episodes that many scholars and practitioners tend to categorize as a “success.” The view that the FRY sanctions were successful in achieving the aims of the UN Security Council is stated most boldly in the Report of the Round Table on United Nations Sanctions in the Case of the Former Yugoslavia, which claims that the sanctions were “remarkably effective” (United Nations Security Council 1996). Although the document provides a list of lessons learned and recommendations for future sanctions regimes, it does not include the challenge of dealing with the criminalized residue of sanctions. Cortright and Lopez similarly claim that the FRY sanctions were “among the most effective in history” (Cortright and Lopez 1995), but they also acknowledge that sanctions fueled “corruption, smuggling, and criminality . . . A vast network of black marketers emerged, much of it connected to and protected by the government” (Cortright and Lopez 1995: 75). However, these observations are not explored at greater length. Part of the reason they give for the “success” of sanctions is that the sanctions did not produce a humanitarian crisis. The criminalizing side effects are thus presumably viewed as much less consequential. If most assessments of the Yugoslav sanctions neglect or under-explore the unintended criminalizing effects of sanctions, a report prepared by the InterAgency Task Force on Serbian Sanctions of the United States Department of State tackles the issue directly but minimizes and downplays its importance (United States Department of State 1996). Criminalization is considered a regrettable but tolerable side-effect of sanctions that are judged to have been reasonably successful. The task force asserts that sanctions enforcement measures in the FRY meant that smugglers were reduced to operating in smaller volumes, but whether such smuggling had other deleterious consequences was not considered. As discussed below, the sanctions-busting smuggling economy was not only far more significant in terms of organization and scale than acknowledged by this official assessment, but the negative political, economic, and social consequences of criminalization have been profound and long-lasting – not only for the targeted country but also for the region as a whole. Interestingly, even the harshest critics of the FRY sanctions tend not to make the criminalizing collateral damage of sanctions the focus of their critiques. For
example, Woodward refers to “sanctions-runners” as part of the local “economic elite” that gained an interest in maintaining the sanctions (Woodward 1995: 294). Licht’s polemic against the sanctions notes in passing that “life under sanctions forced a significant portion of society to live on the fringes of legality. The black market became a way of life” (Licht 1995: 158). These authors thus make some important initial claims about the criminalizing consequences of sanctions, but they do not pursue them further. In this chapter I follow this line of analysis in a more systematic and detailed manner, tracing the political, economic, and societal criminalizing consequences of sanctions across time (during and after the sanctions period) and place (within and outside of the targeted country).
