The ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ legal nature of non-UN sanctions : the case of the US sanctions against Russia

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Creating and contesting hierarchy: the punitive effect of sanctions in a horizontal system

Sanctions are presented as a form of international punishment that not only stigmatises the target, but creates a hierarchy between those who impose punishment and those punished. Such practices go against the principle of sovereign equality and contradict the horizontal structure of the international system. Drawing on the literature on stigma management and resentment, this paper argues that when states react to sanctions, they respond not only to the imposition of stigma, but also to the inferior position in which they are placed. Targets may resent the position of authority adopted by the sanctioners. This may in turn motivate them to contest the status quo upon which sanctioners justify their authority, thereby reasserting the norms and corresponding practices they believe should be prioritized

The Proportionality of Unilateral “Targeted” Sanctions: Whose Interests Should Count?

Comprehensive sanctions were considered to be disproportionate in their collateral effects for the harm caused to the populations of sanctioned States. With the emergence of the concept of targeted sanctions, questions regarding proportionality were expected to fade away. After all, targeted sanctions were supposed to be inherently proportional precisely because they were targeted. Nevertheless, the use of selective embargoes, also known as sectoral sanctions, continues to give rise to issues of proportionality. One of the lacunas of the current system is there is no uniform proportionality standard that applies to unilateral sanctions as these measures fall with different types of legal regimes, each with their own proportionality standard. Drawing from recent State practice and the existing legal standards, the present contribution maps the respective interests that should inform proportionality discussions in distinct sanctions regimes and explores to what extent the proportionality principle can account for each of these interests

Comparison of Shear Capacity of T-Beams Using Strut and Tie Analysis

The objective of this research was to study the shear strength of continuous lightly reinforced concrete beams which are widely used in practice in North America. In 1990 six two-span T-beams were tested at the University of Kansas. The research was focused on the primary variables of longitudinal reinforcement ratio and nominal stirrup strength. The tests indicated that the shear provisions of ACI 318-89 overpredicted the concrete shear capacity of lightly reinforced beams in negative moment regions, and underestimated the stirrup contribution to shear strength which increases with higher flexural reinforcement ratios. These experimental results were reevaluated and analyzed with the shear provisions obtained from existing codes and theories from Europe and Canada including EC 2, DIN I 045, CEB Model Code 1990, ACI 318-95, and Modified Compression Field Theory. In addition a Strut and Tie analysis for these tests also was conducted. The study indicates that the shear strength may be determined by Strut and Tie approaches with variable inclination e of the compression field based on the theory of plasticity to derive the interaction between bending moment and shear . The comparison shows that the shear capacity based on a clear truss model and the theory of plasticity gives results that correspond to the experimental results and lead to an economic design. Moreover, the results of this study also reveal the limitation of the present ACI provisions and show that codes formulated on a rigorous theoretical foundation provides excellent results when compared the test data