Smart Security Council? Analyzing the effectiveness of targeted sanctions

In 2004 the United Nations Security Council initiated a "Working Group on General Issues of Sanctions" in order to increase the Council's effectiveness in terms of sanctions implementation. With this reform, the Council reacted to the harsh criticism from the UN against the conventional sanctions practice. It was the Security Council's latest endeavor to make ratified sanctions more punitive, coercive, and thus effective as far as causing compliance within its judicial framework is concerned. Summarized under the term "smart sanctions", the Security Council tries to be more accurate in addressing sanctions thereby seeking not only to increase political effectiveness, but also to reduce unintended humanitarian suffering. While conventional sanctions are comprehensive and comprised of a variety of measures, such as trade boycotts and embargoes against the entire country, smart or targeted sanctions (as they are also termed) are selective, targeting only at certain areas or individuals. Consequently, sanctions are the practical expression of the Council's sovereignty. The Council "lives and breathes" through the ratification of sanctions, so their corroboration and proper enforcement reflect the organization's vitality. In short, if sanctions fail, the Council fails. So far scholars have accentuated technical questions in their research, such as how to engage in a successful bargaining process and how to imply isolation. They further focused on examining the compliance rate of targeted states. What has been slightly ignored is a potentially poor commitment by states to enforce sanctions in the first place. Quite possibly, the Security Council lacks ratification (what I term input legitimacy) and enforcement (what I term output legitimacy) of smart sanctions. Consequently, the "effectiveness" of smart sanctions does not necessarily have to be linked to the compliance rate of the targeted state. Instead, it might be connected to the commitment shown by the enforcing memb

Gordon Friedrichs, M.A., was born in Heppenheim in 1984. Before completing his degree of Politikwissenschaft und Politikwissenschaft Süd-Asiens in 2012 at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg, he studied at the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main and at the Arizona State University in Tempe, USA. His research is focused on international business as well as on the domestic and foreign policies of the USA and the foreign and security policies of South-Asia. During his studies in the USA and in Heidelberg, he further completed research within the fields of international organisations, comparative party system research and the American voting system.