Workshop: Assessing the Effects and Effectiveness of UN Targeted Sanctions

1-3 October 2009: International Workshop at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

From October 1 through 3, 2009, more than thirty scholars and policy practitioners met for an international workshop on “Assessing the Effects and Effectiveness of UN Targeted Sanctions” at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Each of the participants had extensive experience in the design, implementation, and analysis of UN targeted sanctions. The workshop marked the end of the second phase of a four-phase, four-year reseach project hosted at the CCDP. The project seeks to conduct a systematic, comprehensive, multi-national study of the effects and effectiveness of UN multilateral targeted sanctions. 

The workshop had two purposes: (1) to conduct a state of the art review of knowledge about the effects and effectiveness of multilateral targeted sanctions, and (2) to develop a common research framework for a systematic and comprehensive analysis of all UN targeted sanctions since such measures were first introduced in the early 1990s. This workshop was the first meeting of a larger research project on the impacts and effectiveness of targeted sanctions, which will be carried out by an international research consortium of scholars and practitioners. This consortium includes more than just the participants of the October workshop in Geneva and currently comprises about sixty people worldwide.

The workshop discussed the concept, purpose, and working mechanisms of targeted sanctions as well as their context, their intended and unintended positive and negative consequences, and standards for their evaluation. It concluded with an extensive discussion of the project’s research architecture and a preliminary discussion of targeted sanctions cases. Plans were also made for the project’s next steps and for future meetings of the research consortium, the most recent of which was convened at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans in February 2010.

The Workshop Report is available here.