During the sanctions regime against Iraq, the Iraqi government withheld vital UN food and health aid from its people until March 1997. This was six years after the UN authorized the support and as a direct result, hundreds of thousands of children died
(Mack & Khan, 2000). Quantitatively more Iraqis died from the sanction than as combatants in the Gulf War. Nonetheless, the Iraqi government continued their unlawful behavior solidifying the idea sanctions unfairly punish a population and not a government. Human rights activists argue the humanitarian costs of sanctions far outweigh their benefits.
Economic Sanctions in Current Events
The United States Congress recently legalized the sanctions against the Russian
Federation with the Counter America’s
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This dilemma places the sanctioning country in a precarious position of deciding between pushing their national agenda to violate human rights by depriving the target country of the means to do so, or do they withdraw their economic
‘power’ to ensure the humanity of the civilians in the target country? Another reason sanctions are not as effective as leaders hope they are is because the target country
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can utilize backchannels in the black market or encourage other nations to subvert their agreements to ensure their needs are met. This degrades the global order because it increases illegal activities and additional violations of international law rather than effectively deterring it through the sanction. Even worse is the harmful effects sanctions can have on the sanctioning country’s own economy in the form of increasing unemployment and impeding domestic markets. If trade is cut off, industries will undoubtedly suffer as a result. Not only will the major countries involved in the sanctions have economic aftershocks, but the sanction may unintentionally cause other residual harms to other countries not a part of the sanction regime.
Sanctions are not as useful as world leaders would hope and one can