ABSTRACT
Assessing the success of sanctions should become more complicated after reading this book. The previous literature has accustomed scholars and practitioners to neat presentations about how sanctions work and succeed, but this journey through the experience of the European Union has revealed a picture that can hardly be judged in definitive terms. There is no doubt that sanctions can be useful foreign policy instruments, and this is the reason why they will continue to be a central element in international crisis management and foreign policy scenarios. At the same time, evaluating with scientific rigor the exact degree of success presents insurmountable challenges that cannot be overcome. These challenges are not only of a technical nature, such as operationalizing variables and coding success, but pose epistemological questions that need to be answered when sanctions are the object of our interest. Indeed, it seems to be a futile exercise to aim to measure the success of sanctions when the understanding of success is inherently linked to political considerations that lie in the eyes of the beholders (Baldwin 1985, Cortright and Lopez 2000). In order to avoid falling into this trap, this study applied a method of success assessment that led to lessons about how success can be understood in real case scenarios. Past analyses which have focused primarily on behavioural change and goal-driven criteria for sanctions are doomed to be inaccurate evaluations of sanctions’ true effectiveness. At the expense of formal modelling in favour of greater policy relevance, the mission of this book is to lay the foundations for a methodology that enhances the understanding of how sanctions work and guides the analysis towards assessing their effectiveness. The threefold logics approach presented in this work has helped to address this problem, and if sanctions are seen in terms of coercion, constraint and signalling, then the expectations of what they can or cannot do should become more realistic and their overall assessment more accurate.
