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Sanctions as Prevention

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Fresh Perspectives
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Gillian McKay writes on the relationship between sanctions and mass atrocity prevention in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Given that the sanctions currently imposed on Russian entities and individuals are unprecedented, this contribution asks whether the Ukraine crisis could be a turning point for more effective atrocity-related sanctions going forward. Their targeted use as a means to discharge Pillar III of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) - by (i) coercing or (ii) constraining state behaviour or (iii) by signalling international condemnation of norm violation - is therefore worth understanding in the current context.

Targeted sanctions are generally considered to be most effective when complemented by other diplomatic or military means. In Cote d’Ivoire, for example, sanctions to prevent the escalation of atrocities were thought to be successful when imposed in tandem with mediation efforts. In Libya, too, sanctions have been described as important in degrading the capabilities of Gaddafi’s regime as well as encouraging defections from it, thereby perhaps making a military defeat more likely.

Nonetheless, the ‘sanction’ as a tool in and of itself has the capacity to influence state behaviour in a number of ways.

First, sanctions might be imposed to coerce a change in behaviour. In this way, effective coercion could be the extraction of ‘partial concessions’ or ‘negotiated settlements’ where ‘total capitulation’ seems impossible. In the current context, this might mean halting Putin’s assault on Ukraine, but particularly the indiscriminate attacks on civilians which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Research indicates, however, the coercive approach is successful only 10 per cent of the time.

Second, more successful has been the performance of targeted sanctions in constraining state behaviour. In the Ukraine context, this might mean avoiding nuclear atrocity or reducing the means by which Putin can commit further atrocities. Constraining behaviour is ultimately about raising the cost of perpetrating such crimes versus not. As Professor Matthew Krain has noted, however, ‘sanctions will only be effective if they raise the costs of a murderous policy significantly which is something the UK has been slow to do recently and which the EU failed to do when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

A third and equally successful way in which sanctions might be considered effective is through signalling support to domestic opposition and international disapproval of a state’s behaviour (e.g. in violating R2P). This involves exerting an external pressure which enables civilians to mobilise against a government perpetrating atrocities, thereby applying greater overall pressure to influence state behaviour from the grass-roots as well as from the outside. Although sanctions can also impact the civilian population in adverse ways, some consider this kind of bottom-up pressure as critical to sanctions success. In the current context, tough sanctions signal support to the many brave Russians taking to the streets to protest Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Overall, the jury still appears to be out on whether sanctions actually ‘work’, with research suggesting that such tools are generally unable to halt atrocities once they are ongoing. As such, they might be better deployed to prevent imminent atrocities – something that requires effective network analysis to target the right people at the right time. This kind of network modelling is already used to analyse organised crime, civil and interstate wars, and terrorism, and mapping perpetrator networks in a similar way for atrocity crimes can not only enable more effective targeted sanctions to prevent imminent abuses but also ensure accountability and contribute to future deterrence. Moreover, human rights sanctions, when meaningfully imposed, have the potential to trigger third country compliance – perhaps in Bosnia or Belarus in the European context, but also elsewhere - and thereby contribute to wider atrocity prevention.

As yet, it remains to be seen what impact or how effective the sanctions imposed on Russian entities and individuals will be. Indeed, although sanctions may be best placed to prevent imminent atrocities – a threshold arguably already passed in Ukraine – they, as Krain has argued, ‘may still be worth pursuing as a means to catalyze international action’ to halt ongoing abuses too. But:

‘For this strategy to be successful, actors employing it must first signal a shift in the global context from permissive to prohibitive, and also make any current or future threat of action against perpetrators credible. If the killing has already begun [as it has done in Russia] the perpetrators have evaluated the international context and decided that there is a degree of permissiveness sufficient to allow them to commit atrocities without consequence. They have not been deterred at least in part because they view the credibility or resolve of potential interveners as low, or that the costs likely to be imposed are minimal.’

What this crisis shows is that sanctions hold greater weight and credibility, at least initially, when they are imposed collectively and across sectors – from finance to energy, and retail to sport. The recent UN General Assembly vote demonstrates global solidarity on the issue, and this could be a rare window of opportunity whereby the collective will exists to both halt Russian aggression and set a precedent for the future of cross-sectoral sanctions as an alternative or accompaniment to other measures prescribed by R2P. Indeed, although the R2P principle may not have driven the sanctions imposed on Russia in this instance, they do raise important questions for how this kind of tool can be implemented as part of a wider approach to mass atrocity prevention going forward.

Gillian McKay is a PhD Candidate at the University of Leeds. Her research is focused on the UK’s approach to mass atrocity prevention and is being undertaken in collaboration with the Aegis Trust, supervised within the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

 

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If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P’s Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Dr Richard Illingworth by Email (r.illingworth@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).