This is a revised edition of the classic book on this subject. It chronicles and examines 170 cases of economic sanctions imposed since World War I. Fifty of these cases were launched in the 1990s and are new to this edition.

Special attention is paid to new developments arising from the end of the Cold War and increasing globalization of the world economy. Analyzing a range of economic and political factors that can influence the success of a sanctions episode, the authors distill a set of commandments to guide policymakers in the effective use of sanctions.

This study will be published in two parts: Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy, summarizing the analysis and outlining the policy recommendations and Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: Case Histories, a supplemental CD-ROM containing the case studies.

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Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd edition

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, Kimberly Ann Elliott, and Barbara Oegg
November 2007 • 233 pp. ISBN 978-0-88132-407-5 • $36.95

Economic sanctions—deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal, or threat of withdrawal, of customary trade or financial relations—remain an important yet controversial foreign policy tool that policymakers invoke to respond to perceived misdeeds of foreign governments. This volume is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the Institute’s immensely influential work on economic sanctions originally published in 1983 and last revised in 1990. The authors reassess the overall effectiveness of sanctions, based on additional evidence garnered from cases initiated during the 1990s, and offer updated policy recommendations for the 21st century.

A new political landscape has shifted the focus of sanctions policies but not diminished their use. New features since 1990 include armed conflicts within countries, mostly in Africa and the Balkans, and rapid globalization.

Fresh diplomatic fronts have opened up involving a wide spectrum of issues: ethnic strife, civil chaos, human rights and democracy, terrorism, narcotics, and others. Sanctions now are often deployed in settings where central government authority is fragile or fragmented. In addition to being targeted at the established government, in recent years sanctions have often been aimed at dissident factions as well (witness the recent sad history of Somalia and war-torn West African nations).

The first and second editions of Economic Sanctions Reconsidered offered nine “commandments” to policy officials. In this third edition, the authors instead offer seven “recommendations.” Some lessons from past sanctions experience need to be repeated and others revised to reflect the changing political and economic environment of the 21st century:

• Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew. Policymakers often have inflated expectations of what sanctions can accomplish. At most there is a weak correlation between economic deprivation and political willingness to change. The economic impact of sanctions may be pronounced, especially on the target, but other factors in the situation often overshadow the impact of sanctions in determining the political outcome.

• Friends Are More Likely to Comply than Adversaries. Economic sanctions are most effective when aimed against erstwhile friends and close trading partners. These countries have more to lose, diplomatically as well as economically, than countries with which the sender has limited or adversarial relations.

• Beware Autocratic Regimes. It is hard to bully a bully with economic measures. Senders should not expect that sanctions will work as well against large targets that are strong, stable, hostile, and autocratic.

• Slam the Hammer, Don’t Turn the Screw. There is a better chance to avoid military escalation if sanctions are deployed with maximum impact. This was the authors’ conclusion in 1990 regarding Iraq and remains their policy advice in 2007 in the confrontation with Iran over its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.

• More Is Not Necessarily Merrier. A large coalition of sender countries does not necessarily make a sanctions episode more likely to succeed. Cooperation is generally sought only when the objective is very ambitious and is often not needed when goals are more modest. Moreover, the greater the number of countries needed to implement sanctions and the longer the sanctions run, the greater the difficulty of sustaining an effective coalition.

• Choose the Right Tool for the Job. Sanctions often are the first course in a menu of actions against belligerent nations. In many instances, they are deployed in conjunction with other measures directed against the target: covert action, quasi‑military measures, or regular military operations. Indeed, in some cases, economic sanctions merely provided an interim response until military action could be organized—as President George H.W. Bush admitted in his memoirs about the first Gulf War.

• Don’t Be a Cheapskate or a Spendthrift. Senders need to match costs imposed on domestic constituencies (and allies) to expected benefits; otherwise, public support for the sanctions policy may quickly erode. But senders also need to take care not to worry so much about minimizing self-inflicted costs that they devalue the impact of the overall exercise.

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