Economic Sanctions Research Paper

Economic sanctions are actions that a country or countries (the sender) take in order to restrict the flow of goods, services or capital between itself and another country (target) with the aim of promoting particular foreign policies or increasing national security of which the immediate objective is to deter a certain behavior by imposing cost on the target and its citizens. In most cases, the main objective of economic sanctions is to change the political behavior of the target country in a particular area. They are mostly used by the sender country in order to create costs for the target state and by creating these costs, the sender states hopes to make the target state make changes to its policies
Barry Carter went further by defining

Some scholars and analysts believe they are effective while others feel they are useless therefore, this study aims to analyze their different contributions to the study of economic sanctions. This thesis uses Iran, North Korea and Russia to ascertain if sanctions are effective in achieving their aims, the different factors that affect the effectiveness of sanctions and the unintended consequences of sanctions.
The effectiveness of economic sanctions has been an ongoing debate in international relations. Since it gained popularity as a foreign policy tool, there have been various arguments about how effective they are in changing the behavior of target states. A lot of international relations scholars and experts have written different articles, books and journals that have contributed to this argument.
In all, this offers a review of the existing literature on the effectiveness of economic sanctions. Scholars like Robert Pape strongly believe that economic sanctions do not work and others like Elizabeth Rodgers argue that they work. Pape argues that economic sanctions do not work and all they do is miss their intended target and cause the innocent population pain (Pape, 1997, p. 92). However, Elizabeth Rodgers pointed out that economic sanctions are effective. She argued that effectiveness of economic sanctions is underrated and their successes are hardly reported while failures are exaggerated (Rodgers,

This argument points out that one can’t just say economic sanctions are effective or not effective because there are certain factors that determine the effectiveness of sanctions. Oxenstierna and Olsson argued that some of the factors that affect the effectiveness of economic sanctions are high cost of sanctions on the sender and target country, type of government, level of trade dependency between target and sender country before sanctions, international legitimacy of sanctions, number of sender countries, the motive behind the sanctions and duration of the sanctions. These domestic and international factors can increase or decrease pressure for political change and determine the impact of economic sanctions (Oxenstierna & Olsson , 2015, p.