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The international community should be under no illusion: … humanitarian and human rights policy goals cannot easily be reconciled with those of a sanctions regime. Coercive economic sanctions developed as a conceptual and policy bridge between diplomacy and force for ensuring compliance with UN demands. Recourse to sanctions – diplomatic isolation, restrictions on international travel, trade and financial transactions, arms embargoes – increased dramatically in the 1990s. Compared to sanctions having been imposed only twice until 1990 (in Rhodesia and South Africa), more than a dozen have been imposed since then by a sanctions-happy UN Security Council (UNSC) against Afghanistan, Angola (on rebel forces), Ethiopia, Eritrea, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and former Yugoslavia. The United Nations has played a central role in the imposition and implementation machinery of sanctions because of its defining characteristic as the dispenser of international legitimacy. Although once seen as an attractive non-violent alternative to war, sanctions became discredited for their harsh humanitarian consequences on the civilian population. Instead of the authority of the UN legitimising sanctions regimes, the baleful effects of sanctions began to erode the legitimacy of the UN. This was exacerbated by the paucity of intellectual and institutional foundations for the organisation's sanctions policy. Interest shifted to incorporating carefully thought-out humanitarian exemptions or looking for ‘smarter’ alternatives to comprehensive sanctions that put pressure on regimes rather than peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]