Smart Sanctions: Targeting Economic Statecraft. Edited by David Cortright and

For over a decade, the comprehensive trade sanctions against Iraq have hung like a millstone around the practice of economic statecraft. Scholars and policymakers alike recognize that the sanctions have had a devastating humanitarian impact on the Iraqi population. Yet the sanctions have failed to coerce the Iraqi regime into full compliance with the requisite UN Security Council resolutions. At the same time, the United Nations has relied heavily on this tool of statecraft over the past decade, imposing sanctions fourteen times since 1990. In his 2002 Nobel lecture, Jimmy Carter said that nations must ‘‘strive to correct the injustice of economic sanctions that seek to penalize abusive leaders but all too often inflict punishment on those who are already suffering from the abuse.’ ’ This presents a challenge: is there any way to accommodate the rising demand for multilateral sanctions while minimizing the humanitarian costs such policies create? Enter David Cortright and George Lopez. Under the auspices of the University of Notre Dame’s Fourth Freedom Forum, Cortright and Lopez are responsible for a healthy fraction of the recent scholarly work on economic sanctions (Cortrigh