Picking up on recent contributions’ calls to investigate the negative externalities of sanctions, and drawing on scholarly advances in sanctions research, they develop an explanatory framework to account for the conditions under which unintended consequences occur.
Published in the journal Contemporary Security Policy, the authors’ results show that there are multiple pathways towards unintended consequences, documenting a complex interplay of conditions. Of these, the empirically most important pathways consist of (1) comprehensive sanctions with the involvement of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, (2) sanctions that have been in place for a long time (eight years and more), without P5 involvement, and not directed against autocratic regimes, and (3) sanctions regimes against autocratic targets that are not economically isolated, with P5 involvement.
These results thus resonate with the expectations formulated in the authors’ theory. This applies foremost to the negative impact of comprehensive sanctions and those of long duration, as well as the involvement of P5 members, which are often instrumentalized by target states to shift blame and attention from the domestic regime. The latter applies chiefly to autocratic regimes that are not economically isolated. In this respect, the findings confirm earlier studies discussing the role of sanctions’ types, the involvement of international actors, and the target’s regime type as driving forces of unintended consequences. “Our study delivers a unique and new insight into how these conditions play together in producing adverse effects of sanctions,” MEISSNER and MELLO write.
The authors complemented their QCA analysis with a closer examination of unintended consequences as a result of the sanctions regimes against Haiti (1993–1994) and North Korea (2006–2014). These cases illustrate how comprehensive, namely sectoral and commodity sanctions combined with a broad involvement of international actors can impair the humanitarian and economic situation (Haiti) and how sanctions against stable autocratic targets, together with P5 involvement, can lead to an unintended strengthening of authoritarian regimes (North Korea).
“We see our study as a starting point for systematically investigating the drivers of sanctions’ unintended consequences and observe a twofold need for further research,” the authors state. “First, as evident from the variation on the outcome of unintended consequences and our case illustrations, a nuanced understanding of sanctions’ negative externalities is crucial to future empirical analyses. We provided a fine-grained measure of unintended consequences through an index that we constructed, and more research should be done to investigate the different nuances of sanctions’ negative side-effects, albeit in a systematic fashion.
Second, as theoretically expected, multiple pathways exist in explaining the occurrence of sanctions’ unintended consequences. “Our empirics document three such pathways and a promising avenue for future research would be to assess the external validity of our findings by investigating the extent to which these paths hold in the context of other sanction senders, including the European Union and the United States.”
Katharina L. Meissner & Patrick A. Mello (2022) The unintended consequences of UN sanctions: A qualitative comparative analysis, Contemporary Security Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13523260.2022.2059226
