Economic Sanctions, Morality and Escalation of Demands on Yugoslavia

Economic sanctions are envisaged as a sort of punishment, based on what should be an institutional decision not unlike a court ruling. Hence, the conditions for their lifting should be clearly stated and once those are met sanctions should be lifted. But this is generally not what happens, and perhaps is precluded by the very nature of international sanctioning. Sanctions clearly have political, economic, military and strategic consequences, but the question raised here is whether sanctions can also have moral justification. Illustrated by the example of international sanctions against Yugoslavia, the authors show how the process of escalating demands on a target country, inherent to the very process of sanctioning, can lead ultimately even to overt aggression. As a result of this logic of escalation, economic sanctions cannot be articulated properly in any law-like system. Economic sanctions have much more in common with war than legal punishment, and in fact represent a form of siege. As such, they cannot be ended simply on the basis of their initial rationale, for the very process of sanctions implementation opens up possibilities for setting new goals and a continuous redefinition of the goal that sanctions are seen to have

Overview and Operation of U.S. Financial Sanctions, Including the Example of Iran

Financial sanctions are increasingly being used in the mix of international economic sanctions being employed by the United Nations, regional entities, and individual countries, including the United States. These financial sanctions have become more focused and effective as the tools and techniques have improved significantly for tracing and identifying the financial transactions of terrorists, weapons proliferators, human rights violators, drug cartels, and others. These sanctions can not only freeze financial assets and prohibit or limit financial transactions, but they also impede trade by making it difficult to pay for the export or import of goods and services. In spite of this growing impact of financial sanctions, these sanctions are not well understood outside of a small group of experts. This article provides an introduction to the mechanics and operation of U.S. financial sanctions, and it illustrates their use against Iran

The relevance of time in framing the sanctions framework for defective disclosure

Sanctions imposed on listed companies in cases of breached disclosure obligations have steadily but rather slowly been moving towards a harmonized approach in EU corporate law. Without compromising the potential efficiency of these harmonisation measures, this article aims to propose an alternative method to increase the efficiency of sanctions. By focusing on the importance of time as an element that influences corporate decisions in relation to the breach of disclosure obligations, this article seeks to re-frame the importance of sanctions and to link their severity to the element of time that is potentially instrumentalised by listed companies. This study argues that by linking sanctions and time, the legal framework would be likely to apply more severe sanctions, while adopting differentiated sanctions depending on which disclosure obligations are breached. This new approach aims to trigger a de facto harmonisation trend amongst regulators and judges at the national and EU levels

Strategic vs Non-Strategic Motivations of Sanctioning

We isolate strategic and non-strategic motivations of sanctioning in a repeated public goods game. In two experimental treatments, subjects play the public goods game with the possibility to sanction others. In the STANDARD sanctions treatment, each subject learns about the sanctions received in the same round as they were assigned, but in the SECRET sanctions treatment, sanctions are announced only after the experiment is finished, removing in this way all strategic reasons to punish. We find that sanctioning is similar in both treatments, giving support for nonstrategic explanations of sanctions (altruistic punishment). Interestingly, contributions to the public good in both treatments with sanctioning are higher than when the public goods game is played without any sanctioning, irrespective of announcing the sanctions to their receivers during the play of the game, or only after the game is finished. The mere knowledge that sanctions might be assigned increases cooperation: subjects correctly expect that nonstrategic sanctioning takes place against freeriders.altruistic punishment;nonstrategic sanctions;strategic sanctions;public goods;economic experiment

Self-Organization for Collective Action: An Experimental Study of Voting on Formal, Informal, and No Sanction Regimes

Entrusting the power to punish to a central authority is a hallmark of civilization. We study a collective action dilemma in which self-interest should produce a sub-optimal outcome absent sanctions for non-cooperation. We then test experimentally whether subjects make the theoretically optimal choice of a formal sanction scheme that costs less than the surplus it makes possible, or instead opt for the use of informal sanctions or no sanctions. Most groups adopt formal sanctions when they are of deterrent magnitude and cost a small fraction (10%) of the potential surplus. Contrary to the standard theoretical prediction, however, most groups choose informal sanctions when formal sanctions are more costly (40% of the surplus). Being adopted by voting appears to enhance the efficiency of both informal sanctions and non-deterrent formal sanctions.formal sanctions; informal sanctions; experiment; voting; cooperation; punishment

Self-Organization for Collective Action: An Experimental Study of Voting on Formal, Informal, and No Sanction Regimes

Entrusting the power to punish to a central authority is a hallmark of civilization. We study a collective action dilemma in which self-interest should produce a sub-optimal outcome absent sanctions for non-cooperation. We then test experimentally whether subjects make the theoretically optimal choice of a formal sanction scheme that costs less than the surplus it makes possible, or instead opt for the use of informal sanctions or no sanctions. Most groups adopt formal sanctions when they are of deterrent magnitude and cost a small fraction (10%) of the potential surplus. Contrary to the standard theoretical prediction, however, most groups choose informal sanctions when formal sanctions are more costly (40% of the surplus). Being adopted by voting appears to enhance the efficiency of both informal sanctions and non-deterrent formal sanctions.

A theory of international conflict management and sanctioning

In this paper we analyze sanctioning policies in international law. We develop a model of international military conflict where the conflicting countries can be a target of international sanctions. These sanctions constitute an equilibrium outcome of an international political market for sanctions, where different countries trade political influence. We show that the level of sanctions in equilibrium is strictly positive but limited, in the sense that higher sanctions would exacerbate the military conflict, not reduce it. We then propose an alternative interpretation to the perceived lack of effectiveness of international sanctions, by showing that the problem might not be one of undersanctioning but of oversanctioning.Conflict management, international sanctions, arms embargo, international political market, pressure groups

Comparison to Criminal Sanctions in the Constitutional Review of Punitive Damages

This Article focuses on the third guidepost announced in BMW v. Gore for reviewing whether the amount of punitive damages award is so excessive as to violate due process, specifically, comparing punitive damages to criminal sanctions. Part I of the article examine the Supreme Court\u27s language in several cases about the relevance of criminal sanctions to the question whether a punitive award is constitutionally excessive. It criticizes the Campbell effort to distinguish between civil and criminal penalties under the third guidepost. Part II suggests that the third guidepost, in theory, wrongly constrains courts from imposing sanctions above those created by the legislature and fails to recognize that the conduct addressed by a punitive award may be more blameworthy than that addressed by an applicable statute. Part III considers how comparisons to criminal sanctions have influenced constitutional standards review of punitive awards in the lower courts, both before and after Campbell. The author concludes with the suggestion that although there may be theoretical and practical reasons to dispense with the third guidepost, as long as the Supreme Court continues to require its use, comparisons to criminal sanctions should be as relevant to constitutional review as civil sanctions

Antisocial punishment in two social dilemmas

The effect of sanctions on cooperation depends on social and cultural norms. While free riding is kept at bay by altruistic punishment in certain cultures, antisocial punishment carried out by free riders pushes back cooperation in others. In this paper we analyze sanctions in both a standard public goods game with a linear production function and an otherwise identical social dilemma in which the minimum contribution determines the group outcome. Experiments were run in a culture with traditionally high antisocial punishment (Southern Europe). We replicate the detrimental effect of antisocial sanctions on cooperation in the linear case. However, we find that punishment is still widely effective when actions are complementary: the provision of the public good significantly and substantially increases with sanctions, participants punish significantly less and sanctions radically transform conditional cooperation patterns to generate significant welfare gains

Costly Sanctions and the Maximum Penalty Principle

We study the problem of deterring undesirable behavior in a moral hazard framework with risk averse individuals, noisy information and costly sanctions. We find that, if sanctions are a pure loss, a utilitarian society should use a bang-bang penalty scheme satisfying the maximum penalty principle. If sanctions are monetary but imposing sanctions involves a sufficiently large resource cost, the maximum feasible sanction should also be imposed with positive probability. As a possible justification for endogenously limiting sanctions, we derive the optimal penalty scheme under a Rawlsian welfare function. The maximum sanction actually imposed is then smaller than in the utilitarian case, but it is imposed more frequently. Cet article analyse le problème de la dissuasion des comportemenmts indésirables dans un contexte d'aléa moral avec aversion au risque, information imparfaite et coûts de sanction. Nous montrons que, si les sanctions imposées aux individus sont une pure perte sociale, la politique utilitariste optimale consiste à utiliser un mécanisme de sanction dichotomique satisfaisant le principe de la sanction maximale. Si les sanctions sont pécuniaires mais qu'imposer des sanctions implique un coût en ressource suffisamment élevé, la sanction maximale permise devrait également être imposée avec une probabilité positive. Comme justification possible de sanctions limitées, nous analysons la politique de dissuasion optimale avec une fonction de bien-être rawlsienne. Le sanction maximale est dans ce cas inférieure à celle d'une politique utilitariste, mais elle est imposée plus fréquemment.Deterrence, optimal enforcement, moral hazard, maximal penalty, Rawl's criterion