Precision-guided or blunt? The effects of US economic sanctions on human rights
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Precision‑guided or blunt? The effects of US economic sanctions on human rights Jerg Gutmann1,2 · Matthias Neuenkirch2,3,4 · Florian Neumeier2,4,5 Received: 19 May 2018 / Accepted: 17 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This study analyzes the consequences of economic sanctions for the target country’s human rights situation. We offer a political economy explanation for different types of human rights infringements or improvements in reaction to economic shocks caused by sanctions. Based on that explanation, we derive hypotheses linking sanctions to four types of human rights: economic rights, political and civil rights, basic human rights, and emancipatory rights. We use endogenous treatment regression models to test those hypotheses by estimating the causal average treatment effect of US economic sanctions on each type of human rights within a uniform empirical framework. Unlike previous studies, we find no support for adverse effects of sanctions on economic rights or basic human rights, once the endogenous selection of sanctioned countries is modelled. With respect to women’s rights, our findings even indicate a positive effect of sanctions that is associated with improvements in women’s economic rights. Only our results for political rights and civil liberties suggest significant deterioration under economic sanctions. We conclude that it is important to account for the potential endogeneity of economic sanctions and to distinguish different dimensions of human rights, as the effects of economic sanctions along those dimensions may vary considerably. Keywords Democratization · Discrimination · Economic sanctions · Endogenous treatment model · Human rights · Repression JEL Classification F51 · F52 · F53 · K10 · K11 · P14 · P16 · P26
1 Introduction Economic sanctions typically are imposed to compel the target country to comply with the imposing state’s interests. The coercive power sanctions are believed to entail results from their potential to inflict economic damage. Economic sanctions can take on different Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-019-00746-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Matthias Neuenkirch neuenkirch@uni‑trier.de Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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forms; they can involve restrictions on commercial or financial transactions, retractions of foreign aid, investment bans, or embargoes on trade with certain or all goods and commodities. Relying on sanctions instead of alternative means of coercion may raise hopes that international military conflict can be avoided. However, the use of sanctions has been criticized because of the potential damage they inflict on the civilian population (de Waart 2015; Peksen 2011). The findings of Allen and Lektzian (2013) indicate that highly effective sanctions have adverse health effects that are comparable to tho
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