The Complex Road to Undoing Sanctions Regimes
- While much attention is paid to how sanctions are imposed, far less focus is placed on how and when they should be lifted
- This paper maps out key reasons for sanctions relief and major obstacles to effective sanctions relief - across the political, legal, and economic dimensions
- Policymakers face multiple dilemmas, balancing trade-offs between clarity and flexibility, coalition size and manageability, timing and leverage, and reversibility and credibility
- When starting sanctions, policymakers would do well to consider how they would like to end them in the future
In an increasingly tense geopolitical environment, sanctions have become a favoured foreign policy tool among governments – not least those of the United States and the European Union. The widespread implementation of sanction regimes has prompted extensive analysis of their implementation (focusing for instance on punitive vs. incentivising measures) and their effectiveness. However, the issue of sanction termination remains largely underexplored by scholars and policy analysts alike. As Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Nicholas Mulder have put it, ‘the important question is no longer how sanctions should be targeted. It is whether effective relief is possible when changing political circumstances require the lifting of sanctions.’ This oversight is problematic, given the common occurrence of sanctions relief and its significant role in peace processes and the reintegration of sanctioned countries into global value chains and the international economy more broadly. The recent policy debates in the United States and European Union about lifting sanctions on Syria serve as a reminder of the importance of this topic.
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