Making sanctions work: promoting compliance, punishing violations, and discouraging sanctions busting

Abstract

The costs that a sender’s economic sanctions inflict on a target depend on the investments that sender governments make in their implementation and enforcement. To make sanctions work, sender governments have to obtain the compliance of the parties subject to their sanctions’ jurisdiction and prevent third-party actors from undercutting them. This chapter examines the challenges that non-compliance and sanctions busting pose to successful sanctioning efforts and how sender governments can overcome them. Focusing on insights from the United States, I discuss six different policies for improving the effectiveness of sanctioning efforts, how they complement one another, and what sanctions challenges they help senders overcome. The chapter also explores how targets’ responses to sanctions are shaped by the implementation and enforcement strategies senders adopt. The analysis reveals that U.S. strategies have made its economic sanctions more effective, but the policies’ costs means that most countries will likely not employ them.