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19 Fletcher F. World Aff. 65 (1995)
The Sanctions Era: An Alternative to Military Intervention

handle is hein.journals/forwa19 and id is 285 raw text is: THE SANCTIONS ERA:
AN ALTERNATIVE TO MILITARY
INTERVENTION
GEORGE A. LOPEZ and DAVID CORTRIGHT
Economic sanctions have been part of the diplomatic repertoire for centuries.
Originally forged as a strategy for waging economic war during ongoing
hostilities, in the modem era sanctions have assumed varying purposes. They
are sometimes a coercive foreign policy measure taken short of war, a multi-
lateral instrument of preventive diplomacy, a strategy to spark political and
social change within a target country, or even a prelude to war.' In the post-Cold
War world, the prominence of economic sanctions has increased dramatically,
as have the different situations in which they are employed. A glance at a series
of major international events within the past year illustrates rather well the
unprecedented pace and diversity of sanctions episodes.
In 1992 the United States began a half-hearted policy of invoking sanctions
against the military dictatorship of General Raoul C~dras in Haiti. By the spring
of 1994 international and regional pressure pushed the United States and the
U.N. Security Council to tighten the sanctions and set deadlines for the depar-
ture of the junta. At the same time, the United States threatened stringent
sanctions against North Korea for refusing to permit full inspection of suspected
nuclear weapons activities. In Haiti, sanctions fell short of their goal of over-
throwing the dictatorship, and ultimately they were combined with coercive
1 A succinct review of the use of economic warfare and coercion since the Seven Years War can
be found in Tor Egil Forland, The History of Economic Warfare: International Law, Effectiveness,
Strategies, Journal of Peace Research Vol. 30, no. 2,151-62; and Stephen C. Neff, Boycott and the Law
of Nations: Economic Warfare and Modem International Law in Historical Perspective, in Ian
Brownlie and D.W. Bowett (eds.), The British Yearbook of International Law, 1988 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 135-45. The best theoretical treatment of sanctions as a diplomatic tool can
be found in David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
For a critique of sanctions as a trap door to war, see Jack Patterson, The Political and Moral
Appropriateness of Sanctions, in David Cortright and George Lopez, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or
Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
George A. Lopez is Professor of Government and International Studies and Faculty Fellow at the
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. David
Cortright is President of the Fourth Freedom Forum, Goshen, Indiana, and a visiting Faculty
Fellow at the Kroc Institute. Mr. Lopez and Mr. Cortright are editors and contributors to
Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World? from which
some of the material in this essay is drawn.

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