Global sanctions are an important policy tool for curbing international crime and promoting international wellbeing. Sanctions can be imposed against entire countries, regimes and individuals to prevent their financial support of terrorist activity or other illegal activities, e.g., the CoCom embargo that NATO allies imposed against the Soviet Union in the 1940s to limit technology exports.
They can also be imposed to compel these governments or individuals to change their behavior, e.g., the UN sanction against Liberia that helped bring down the dictatorship of Charles Taylor in 2003. The effectiveness of sanctions, however, varies widely. They depend on the size of the costs and benefits, as well as the economic and political context. Whether they work or not, they are often the preferred instrument of policymakers for nonmilitary statecraft when alternatives such as diplomacy or military statecraft are unavailable or inappropriate.
The GSDB includes a comprehensive listing of the official policy objectives of sanctions and their expected impact, and it is one of the first datasets to cover this topic in detail. This dimension adds another dimension to assessments of sanctions’ success, making the GSDB an important addition to the literature and a powerful new tool for research, policymaking, and public debate. In this context, the GSDB’s coverage of the full range of instruments and their duration over time also allows researchers to compare and contrast how various instruments have evolved. This can be especially helpful in the case of a changing policy environment, such as that in which some countries seem to have moved away from a prior assessment that sanctions are intended to prompt policy change and toward more applications designed to degrade the access of malign actors to the global economy.