Methods and Critique

How do we determine whether international economic sanctions are “successful”? So far, the sanctions literature has held closely to the answer that they believe policymakers would give: they are successful insofar as they compel the target of sanctions to comply with the senders’ stated demands. Yet in their haste to provide policy advice on whether sanctions work, scholars have neglected two critical points. First, even if the benchmark is “compliance”, the assessment of sanctions ’ success rate has proceeded without the development of a robust methodology for doing so. The subfield exhibits a “reverse ” development where methodological considerations are only debated after the success rate. Secondly, the fixation on compliance neglects ample evidence that sanctions are intended to secure many other goals unrelated to the target’s behaviour, both domestically in the sender-states, and internationally. It makes no sense t