Women’s economic discourse does not often address the impact of SANCTIONS. And yet, sanctions can have a profoundly serious effect on the lives of civil society women and children. In the last two decades, economic sanctions have risen from obscurity to become a central instrument of global governance and a key policy in many states’ and international organizations’ security policies. Does the economic pain of sanctions lead to political gain – for whom? Those in power who decide to impose sanctions, may well not realize or even consider the massive human suffering that can result. This WUNRN release looks at the gender lens of economic sanctions.
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BEIJING PLATFORM FOR ACTION
https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/armed.htm
- Women & Armed Conflict
Strategic Objective E.3.
Promote non-violent forms of conflict resolution and reduce the incidence of human rights abuse in conflict situations
TAKE MEASURES IN ACCORDANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL LAW WITH A VIEW TO ALLEVIATING THE NEGATIVE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
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European Journal of Economic Relations:
https://ejt.sagepub.com/content/20/2/463.abstract
THE NEGATIVE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC SANCTIONS ON WOMEN
- Cooper Drury – University of Missouri, USA
Dursun Peksen – University of Memphis, USA
Abstract
Though it is widely accepted that advancing women’s rights is crucial to promoting more economic prosperity, good governance, and social equality, very few studies have analyzed the gender-specific effects of foreign policy tools. In this study, we focus on the impact that a frequently used coercive tool — international economic sanctions — has on women’s well-being. Sanctions can have a devastating impact on both the target country’s economic and political stability, and women often suffer significantly from the effects of such external shocks due to their vulnerable socioeconomic and political status. We thus argue that foreign economic pressures will reduce the level of respect for women’s rights in the targeted countries. We use four different measures of women’s economic, political, and social status to analyze the gender-specific consequences of economic coercion. Results from the analysis for the period 1971–2005 indicate that sanctions are likely to exacerbate women’s rights. The data analysis also shows that the suggested negative impact of economic coercion on women’s well-being is conditioned by the wealth of a targeted country; women in poor countries are hit the hardest by economic sanctions.
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ISN Zurich – Foreign Policy Centre
https://fpc.org.uk/fpc-briefing-how-do-international-economic-sanctions-not-work/
HOW DO INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC SANCTIONS (NOT) WORK?
By Dr. Lee Jones – November 2015
Executive Summary
Link to Full 7-Page Article: https://fpc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/1708.pdf
International economic sanctions are used widely to respond to myriad domestic and international crises. While many ask whether sanctions work, a prior question should be: ‘how are they supposed to effect the change we seek, and do they actually “work” this way in practice?’ This policy briefing summarises five years of research into how ‘economic pain’ translates – or fails to translate – into ‘political gain’ in target states. The starting point is that political outcomes in target states are predominantly determined by struggles between ruling and opposition coalitions of social and political forces. Sanctions ‘work’ by manipulating the political economy of targets, with consequences for the composition of forces contesting state power, plus their resources, alliances and strategies. Where sanctions can compel ruling and opposition coalitions to adopt strategic responses that meet the goals of those imposing sanctions, they may be ‘successful’. However, this is generally possible only where opposition groups are already powerful and well organised. In contexts where oppositions are weak and fragmented, sanctions tend to entrench their exclusion from power, even if they also manage to weaken ruling coalitions. Since this is often the case in states where sanctions are used, sanctions are often ineffective. Lessons for policymakers include the need for careful planning, including plausibly specifying the mechanisms by which they expect sanctions to operate. If the mechanisms cannot be identified, sanctions should not be imposed.
Introduction
Unanswered questions about economic sanctions In the last two decades, sanctions have risen from obscurity to become a central instrument of global governance and a key policy in many states’ and international organisations’ security policies. While sanctions had been imposed on only a handful of states in the mid-twentieth century, by 2000, 50 states were targeted. Enthusiasm about their use was tempered by the experience in Iraq, where comprehensive sanctions inflicted colossal human suffering without toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, the invention of ‘targeted’ or ‘smart’ sanctions – directed at leading regime figures – has fueled their continued use in virtually every international crisis. Many have questioned whether sanctions actually work. The conventional wisdom is that sanctions only succeed in meeting their stated objectives in about a third of cases. Their defenders maintain this is better than ‘doing nothing’. But this focus on whether sanctions work overlooks a necessarily prior question: how are they supposed to work, and do they function as expected? How is economic pain meant to deliver political gain? Through what social and political mechanisms? Sanctions experts agree that our understanding of this question is minimal. Yet, if policymakers have no idea of how imposing sanctions is meant to lead to the political outcome they desire, they are inflicting economic damage and human suffering merely in the vague hope that some good will come of it. This is deeply unethical and leads to unsound public policy. Furthermore, if we do not know how sanctions operate, we really cannot tell whether sanctions ‘worked’ in a particular case or whether something else produced the outcomes we observe. This briefing draws on five years of research by this author into how sanctions operate, recently published as Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (Oxford University Press, 2015). It explains how sanctions affect target states’ politics, draws on case studies, and identifies lessons for policymakers……..
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