Understanding United Nations targeted sanctions: an empirical analysis

Nations sanctions have undergone profound transformations in the past two decades. In 1990, the Security Council (UNSC) imposed a general, comprehensive embargo on trade with Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. In 2015 the UN has 16 sanctions committees, managing regimes that have little in common with the one imposed against Iraq a quarter of a century ago. The sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 covered all goods entering or leaving the entire country, whereas those imposed today are most often directed against individuals or non-state entities, and are more limited in scope. According to a newly available dataset on UN targeted sanctions, 1 the Security Council used this instrument on 23 occasions between 1991 and 2013. Most of the well-known crises that have affected the stability of the international system, from the conflict in Angola to the more recent troubles in Yemen and the Central African Republic, have prompted the UNSC to resort to this 'newer' kind of sanctions. The novelties of targeted sanctions have been appreciated in theoretical terms, but comparative and systematic analyses that provide the empirical evidence to identify their innovative characteristics are still lacking.