Signifying Nothing: Why Terrorist Blacklists Don’t Work

In July, the EU caved to pressure from the U.S. and Israel and added Hezbollah’s “military wing” to its blacklist of terrorist entities subject to financial sanctions. The U.S. and Israel applauded the move; Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah shrugged it off as meaningless.

Nasrallah is right: It is meaningless. The first reason it’s meaningless, as noted elsewhere, is that Hezbollah is a fully integrated political and military organization, and there is no real way to enforce sanctions against the “military wing” by itself.

The second and more important reason is that, as a policy tool, terrorist blacklists in general are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive, as U.S. experience demonstrates well. The main thing terrorist blacklists do is freeze the assets of the groups or individuals listed, under the logic that terrorism costs money, and cutting off the money suffocates the terrorism. This logic is so entrenched that an executive order to “starve terrorists of their support funds” was actually the opening salvo the U.S. launched in the “war on the global terror network” in September 2001, before the October invasion of Afghanistan.

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 WPR’s fully searchable library of 16,000+ articles
  • Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts, delivered to you every weekday
  • Weekly in-depth reports on important issues and countries
  • Daily links to must-read news and analysis from top sources around the globe, curated by our keen-eyed team of editors
  • The Weekly Wrap-Up email, with highlights 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