Questioning comprehensive sanctions: the birth of a norm

Abstract

In this paper, the authors argue that a new international norm against comprehensive sanctions is emerging and gaining substantial support among states. A transnational network of individual activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is driving the creation of this norm. To exercise its influence, the network mobilizes information about humanitarian suffering in states targeted by international sanctions and utilizes framing techniques to persuade others to endorse the new norm. Yet this explanation is incomplete. Humanitarian groups and norms trace their roots to the mid-1800s, and civilian suffering from sanctions undoubtedly goes back much farther, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that a norm against comprehensive sanctions began to emerge. In response, it is argued that the norm was triggered by the dramatic increase in sanctions imposed by the United Nations in the post-Cold War era. Both the UN’s accessibility and its prevailing humanitarian norms facilitated network influence. During the Cold War, states had imposed sanctions without utilizing the UN. With the dramatic increase in UN-sponsored sanctions in the 1990s, an organization whose normative foundations involve the alleviation of human suffering was itself direcdy responsible for imposing sanctions that deepened and prolonged human misery. This stark, well-publicized contrast offered a favorable normative and political environment in which the arguments of humanitarian groups would be taken seriously. It became impossible for states to argue that comprehensive sanctions and humanitarian well-being could be reconciled; as a result, one goal or the other had to be modified. Over time, steady network pressure to improve humanitarian conditions in sanctioned countries produced a reaction against comprehensive sanctions.