The Evolution of Economic Coercion: From Sanctions to Targeted Financial Measures

The Evolution of Economic Coercion: From Sanctions to Targeted Financial Measures

For the past eight months, Western nations at the United Nations Security Council have unsuccessfully sought to impose sanctions on the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for its violent repression of a pro-reform revolt across the country. The effort follows their success last February in getting the council to impose muscular penalties on the now-defunct government of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, U.N. sanctions are currently in place against North Korea and Iran as a response to these countries' violations of international nonproliferation obligations. Despite the diverging motivations behind each of these efforts to penalize the targeted countries, they are all the result of an elemental reform in the application of national and global economic statecraft to constrain and influence the actions of rogue regimes and, increasingly, nonstate actors.

Though these new tools are prominent and the changes appreciable, in the public discourse coercive economic statecraft is still synonymous with trade embargos. It is true that trade boycotts were once the preferred instrument of economic power, but for the past two decades the international community has shown a clear predilection for a more refined subset of coercive tools, including targeted financial sanctions.

Sanctions Old and New

Keep reading for free!

Get instant access to the rest of this article by submitting your email address below. You'll also get access to three articles of your choice each month and our free newsletter:

Or, Subscribe now to get full access.

Already a subscriber? Log in here .

What you’ll get with an All-Access subscription to World Politics Review:

A WPR subscription is like no other resource — it’s like having a personal curator and expert analyst of global affairs news. Subscribe now, and you’ll get:

  • Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of tens of thousands of articles.
  • Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts, delivered to you every weekday.
  • Regular in-depth articles with deep dives into important issues and countries.
  • The Daily Review email, with our take on the day’s most important news, the latest WPR analysis, what’s on our radar, and more.
  • The Weekly Review email, with quick summaries of the week’s most important coverage, and what’s to come.
  • Completely ad-free reading.

And all of this is available to you when you subscribe today.

More World Politics Review