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Over two years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the impact and efficacy of sanctions against Russia remain highly uncertain and contested. This uncertainty largely stems from two critical fallacies: a lack of clear terminology in addressing sanction effectiveness and the continued reliance on behavioral change as the primary measure of assessment. The Special Issue "Impact, Effectiveness and Success of Economic Sanctions: the case of Russia and Belarus" shed light on these fallacies and it contributes to introduce a novel method in six phases designed to enhance the complexity and depth of evaluations on the effectiveness of sanctions, applying this innovative approach to the case of sanctions against Russia. This Editorial introduction presents the Special Issue by offering terminological clarifications for key terms in sanction policy evaluation, such as impact, effectiveness, efficiency, utility, and success. It reviews current evidence on the impact and effectiveness of sanctions against Russia, and it outlines the analytical framework that the contributions in this special issue employ in analysing sanctions against Russia. The goal is to provide an analytical framework useful for analyzing current and future sanction policies, reflecting an increasing trend among states to use sanctions as a means to manage and respond to international crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of European Union (EU) policies has been investigated for several policy areas, but Decisions made under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) have rarely been considered. While many CFSP measures are applicable throughout the EU without the need for further action on the domestic level, some Decisions must be implemented by Council Regulations. These Council Regulations adopted with the intent to implement CFSP Decisions have qualities of Directives, which delegate implementing tasks to member states and require transposition. The aim of this article is to investigate whether restrictive measures imposed by the EU are uniformly implemented across the member states, and, if not, to what extent implementation performance varies. We observe significant differences in implementation performance across member states. The findings of this article are twofold. First, we claim that implementation and compliance studies should involve CFSP decisions more systematically. Second, empirical confirmation is provided of how uneven transposition and application occurs also in CFSP matters. This study is based on empirical work that consisted of desk research and semi-structured interviews with national competent authorities of 21 EU member states taking place between March 2020 and January 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decisions to impose sanctions on Russia and to lift them on Iran, in opposition to the wishes of the United States, contributed to the elevation of the profile of the European Union among the main global actors in international politics. However, the EU imposes sanctions since the spring of 1994, shortly after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. Even though the EU consequently has 26 years of experience herewith, EU sanctions have been mostly studied only on a case-by-case basis. The aim of this article is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the experience of the EU with sanctions. Specifically, it presents the results of a newly constructed database of EU autonomous sanctions constituted by 48 cases of these restrictive measures, which have been subdivided in 85 episodes. The analysis revolves around four questions that we asked in each case: when sanctions were in force, what type(s) were used, where the targets were located and why restrictive measures were imposed. The analysis of the empirical database leads to observations about the EU as an international actor and, more generally, on the trends vis-à-vis the utilisation of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EU sanctions on Russia created concerns among its members. It is well known that sanctions impose a cost on their targets as well as on the senders, as lamented by European governments, but the costs of EU sanctions on its members have not been fully explored. This article intends to fill this gap by looking at the cost of EU sanctions on Russia. Who is bearing the cost among EU countries? This article argues that sanctions had a redistributive impact across the EU. Whereas exports fell for all countries, with Germany, Italy and Finland in the leading positions, the article shows that there are economic sectors that increased their exports to Russia after the imposition of sanctions, which occurred particularly in countries as Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. This conclusion is reached by looking at the export flows from individual EU member states divided by SITC sectors to Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

United Nations sanctions have undergone profound transformations in the past two decades. In 1990, the UN Security Council imposed a general, comprehensive embargo on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. In 2015, there are 16 Sanctions Committees managing regimes that have little in common with the one imposed against Iraq in 1990. The measures imposed against Iraq were comprehensive, covering all goods coming in and out of the country, while sanctions imposed today are mostly against individuals, non-state entities and are more limited in scope. This article aims to provide empirical and systematic evidence of some of the distinctive qualities of UN targeted sanctions. The analysis identifies three distinctive characteristics of targeted sanctions. First, targeting individuals and non-state actors has permitted the use of sanctions in a wider range of crisis types. Second, the targets of sanctions are substantially different from comprehensive sanctions. Third, the form taken by sanctions is substantially different today from the trade embargoes imposed in the past. The author concludes that the Security Council should devote special attention to the designing and implementation phases of sanctions. The article makes use of the new database prepared by the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), which includes all cases of UN targeted sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2002 and this article aims at evaluating the success of that decision. Applying a broader definition of success, this article assumes that sanctions can coerce, constrain and signal. Contrary to most of the literature holding that sanctions are imposed to change the behaviour of targets, this article argues that the sanctions on Zimbabwe appear to have been motivated by a constraining logic and, thus, what to expect from them and how to assess their success should be measured accordingly. The article holds that the restrictive measures of the EU fulfilled their expectations in making life harder for the members of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and contributed to creating the conditions for the positive evolution of the situation in Zimbabwe with the power sharing agreement reached in 2009. The constraint on ZANU-PF benefits the MDC-T and MDC-M. The assessment of EU restrictive measures should take place under this light. The recent reduction of the individuals and entities targeted by EU sanctions is an interesting development that confirms how Brussels is interested in the stabilisation of the institutional framework wherein ZANU-PF would respect the newly formed institutional framework. The coercive aspect, allowing ZANU-PF to comply with the demands of the EU, is a further important improvement of the situation in the country that can be captured by the theoretical framework adopted in this article and that should help to lead the future analysis on sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is considerable debate on why are sanctions imposed, but little agreement so far. While the only consensus is that sanctions are aimed at changing the behaviour of a target, in fact, international sanctions can also be imposed to constrain actors or send signals. Since the creation of the Union in 1992, the EU has imposed 21 autonomous restrictive measures that are difficult to understand and compare without the proper analytical tools. The application of a tripartite taxonomy of the purpose of sanctions to the cases of the EU sanctions on Belarus, Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan is used to illustrate the differences and to set guidelines for a better understanding of international sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as targeted sanctions proposed by the United Nations, the impact of regional sanctions, and the objectives of international organizations.