Targeted sanctions and protection of innocent populations

¶ … Humanitarian Implications of Sanctions

The establishment of international governing bodies and global peacekeeping alliances has facilitated a new way of combating rogue behavior amongst the nations of the world. Where previously military confrontation and occupation appeared as the only ways of pursuing conflict resolution with intransigent forces, today the economic alliances comprising the world community have created a number of options for pressuring policy change or greater global alignment where needed. This has created the impetus for economic sanctions, which are used to isolate those behaving out of accordance with the world community. By restricting trade with such nations and by limiting both incoming resource from imports and incoming revenue from exports, sanctions may bring to bear a heavy toll on targeted nations.

As our research denotes though, this toll is rarely ever isolated in impact simply to the regime or leadership upon which pressure is sought. The deprivation of key resources and revenue will be imposed more directly upon the general public of any such nation, meaning that with any policy of sanctioning, countless innocents are impacted by a lack of access to food, medicine, fuel and other basic living requirements. For those imposing sanctions under the premise that this might improve the humanitarian conditions facing those in developing and despotically ruled nations, or instigate an opening up of leadership to the world community, the suffering which is levied upon the publics in such nations seems to counteract the desired effect of such a policy.

Jonge Oudraat (2007) offers some strategic consideration to how the use of sanctions might be refined to hone its targeting of despotic or rogue leadership while preserving the living standards of the publics in effected nations. Particularly, the text discusses the strategic focus of sanctions as having a particular bearing on how effective and humane their repercussions may be. Here, the text cites a transition from a focus on "compellence to denial -- withholding the means that could lead to threatening policies or behavior -- and deterrence -- discouraging the adoption of threatening policies or behavior." (Jonge Oudraat, 338) This shift demonstrates a greater interest in focusing the nature of sanctions strictly on an offending action rather than in a sweeping manner which impacts the civil order of a targeted nation.

An example of use to our discussion might be North Korea, where the UN has increasingly sought sanctions that focus their attention on the equipment, technology and resource required to advance North Korea's ambition for nuclear capability. The desire to protect a public already recognized for its issues of poverty, humanitarian abuse and scarcity of resource has encouraged a shift away from methods of compellence that would seek to break the North Korean regime by popular deprivation of economic and infrastructural necessaries.

The idea of denial and deterrence sharpens the relevance of sanctions by ensuring that deprivation is felt by the regime in question rather than by the public. Even still, such policies are only marginally more effective in protecting innocents from suffering where sanctions occur. As a more general rule, sanctions promote a disengagement from nations that must more actively be included in the world community if their publics are to experience improvements in standards of living.