Since the late s, targeted sanctions and general humanitarian sanctions exemptions have aimed at avoiding the disastrous humanitarian consequences of comprehensive sanctions. In parallel, global banks in charge of administering the international trade of vital goods food and medicine have received guidance on how to implement risk-based approaches to avoid completely blockading sanctioned jurisdictions. But these efforts have failed. This article asks: Why has the governance of sanctions and sanctions exemption failed, and what can be done to fix the problem?
It argues that a hybrid form of governance in the field of sanctions is responsible for current humanitarian problems. Based on more than eighty interviews with treasury officials, sanctions experts, compliance officers, and others, and taking the international trade of vital goods in Iran as an example, this article assesses various fixes to the governance failures and solutions to address the payment problems that exporters of vital goods in sanctioned jurisdictions face.
Foreign Policy. The debate around the humanitarian consequences of economic sanctions is, by now, an old one. The humanitarian consequences of these sanctions of the s and associated corruption scandals like the one surrounding the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq, 2 created the impetus for the international community to move from the concept of "comprehensive sanctions" toward "targeted" or "smart" sanctions.
In all these cases, there should be, in theory, no humanitarian consequences of targeted sanctions, as they should not affect the trade in food, medicine, or other basic goods.
However, the paradigm of targeted sanctions has been applied since the mids in an increasingly comprehensivized manner, as illustrated in the cases of North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. During that Use this link to get back to this page. Date: Jan-March From: Global Governance Vol. Document Type: Article. Length: 9, words. Lexile Measure: L. Abstract Since the late s, targeted sanctions and general humanitarian sanctions exemptions have aimed at avoiding the disastrous humanitarian consequences of comprehensive sanctions.
