Sanctions are tools for coercive political pressure. They come in many forms, from a blockade that deprives the economy to a ban on travel by specific individuals. They are typically used as a tool to pressure authoritarian regimes, but they can also be deployed in cases where there is a big power imbalance–such as when the US imposed sanctions on pipelines from the Soviet Union to Europe, a clear antecedent of the Nord Stream 2 saga. But sanctions have their own problems: they often fail to achieve their political goals and can cause even more harm than the problem they are trying to solve. They can provoke a war, they can cause humanitarian crises, and they can make the political situation even worse for the target country.
One key reason for the failure of sanctions is that they are not sufficiently targeted. Sanctions should be targeted at policymakers and selected economic sectors and the costs of the sanction should be carefully estimated to minimize collateral damage. It is also necessary to include estimates of the cost to the sanctioner’s economy and prevent local companies from circumventing sanctions.
The Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB) addresses these limitations. It is the first dataset to systematically list official sanction objectives, providing the opportunity for an empirical analysis of their success rate. The GSDB’s coverage of sanctions over an extended period and its rich dimensionality open up several new avenues for research. For example, we find that a large share of sanctions objectives are linked to democratization efforts and support for human rights. But, as the case of South Africa demonstrates, sanctions can also trigger change, fuelling the economic and government crisis faced by a regime and empowering activists to rise up against it.