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Punishing the violators? Arms embargoes and economic sanctions as tools of norm enforcement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Jennifer L. Erickson Open the ORCID record for Jennifer L. Erickson [Opens in a new window]
Jennifer L. Erickson*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Boston College
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*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The persistence and strength of international norms are thought to depend partly on the willingness of actors to punish their violation, but norm enforcement is often inconsistent. This article investigates states’ use of economic sanctions in order to gain insight into the role of metanorms (norms about enforcing norms) in international politics and explain this inconsistency. The quantitative analyses examine patterns of economic sanctions and arms embargo practices across different security norms and reveal two central findings. First, international metanorms may accommodate important interstate relationships. Although severe human rights abuse, conflict, nuclear weapons development, and support for terrorist organisations tend to attract sanctions, they are infrequent in comparison with norm violations. Valued relationships between senders and targets seem to be an accepted limit to the pursuit of costly norm enforcement. Second, norm violations nevertheless remain rare, suggesting that factors other than the prospect of material punishment may encourage compliance. Indeed, by preserving interstate relationships, international metanorms may facilitate the engagement needed for socialisation and social pressures as alternative compliance mechanisms.

Keywords

SanctionsArms EmbargoesNorm EnforcementMetanormsInternational Security
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 96 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2019 

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References

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81 Researchers should avoid treating ordinal variables as continuous in an OLS regression, since the distances between categories are unknown and violate linear regression assumptions.

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83 Since CLARIFY does not accommodate dyadic panel data, I use the Delta method to calculate the predicted probabilities of the main independent variables of interest.

84 Amnesty-coded human rights produce no substantively different results from the DOS variable.

85 Using the DOS list alone also produces positive and significant coefficients. Support for anti-terrorism treaties is insignificant, presumably because of the extremely high membership rates.

86 It becomes significant only with the removal of human rights from the model.

87 Removing oil production from the relevant models produces no significant changes for the human rights or interstate conflict coefficients.

88 The human rights analyses end at 2006, because the (non-lagged) human rights organisations variable ends at 2005. Excluding that variable, the human rights coefficients for 2007–10 are positive and significant.

89 Robert Kahn, ‘Have Sanctions Become the Swiss Army Knife of U.S. Foreign Policy?’, Council on Foreign Relations (24 July 2017), available at: {https://www.cfr.org/blog/have-sanctions-become-swiss-army-knife-us-foreign-policy} accessed 4 January 2018; Jacob Lew, ‘Remarks on the Evolution of Sanctions and Lessons for the Future’, Carnegie Endowment Peace (30 March 2016), available at: {https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl0398.aspx} accessed 4 January 2018; Richard Haass, ‘Sanctioning madness’, Foreign Affairs, 76:6 (1997), pp. 74–85; Adam Szubin, ‘Remarks’, Center for a New American Security (15 April 2016), available at: {https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl0425.aspx} accessed 4 January 2018.

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93 Scholars typically count sanctions that change target behaviour in accordance with sender expectations as ‘successful’ (Cortright and Lopez, Smart Sanctions; Hufbauer et al., Economic Sanctions Reconsidered). Of course, defining and measuring success may vary, based on senders’ goals and expectations and targets’ responses – without even considering how to establish causality. ‘Success’ can also be difficult to detect, because those states with stronger incentives to resolve their issues may do so before attracting sanctions (Drezner, The Sanctions Paradox; Miller, ‘The secret success of nonproliferation sanctions’). On defining and measuring sanctions success/effectiveness, see Baldwin, David, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Brzoska, ‘Measuring the effectiveness of arms embargoes’.

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96 ‘The punishment of Sisi Fuss’, Economist (10 June 2017), p. 49.