The Impact of Economic Sanctions on Respect for Human Rights after the End of the Cold War

Abstract

The study analyzes the impact of economic sanctions on respect for human rights in target countries from 1989 to 2009. Conversely to most research undertaken in the field of economic sanctions, this study asks what the actual effects of economic sanctions are, rather than analyzing their effectiveness for achieving specific policy goals in international affairs. This is a comparative analysis based on quantitative analysis and exploratory analysis of visualized data. This methodological approach allows me to detect different impact patterns of economic sanctions on respect for human rights. The study focuses on the differences between multilateral and unilateral, and comprehensive and targeted sanctions. More specifically, the influence of the regime type of sanctioned states is taken into account. My empirical results show that sanctions were typically imposed after human rights respect decreased in the target country. Respect for human rights typically increases shortly after the imposition of sanctions. Multilateral and targeted economic sanctions have a stronger negative impact on respect for human rights, compared to unilateral and comprehensive sanctions. Additionally, whereas respect for human rights in target countries typically decreases after sanctions have been imposed, the level of democracy increases over the whole range of sanction episodes, which allows me to refute regime type of target countries as alternative explanation for diminishing respect for human rights. I illustrate these results with three case vignettes, each representing a different typical pattern of sanctioning and respect for human rights.

Keywords: Economic sanctions, Human rights, Exploratory data analysis