Economic sanctions

• 1. Introduction

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  Economic sanctions are one of the most debated tools in the modern political arsenal. A 2025 article in The Lancet Global Health linked US and EU sanctions to 38 million deaths between 1970 and 2021. Scholars John Mueller and Karl Mueller argued in their Foreign Affairs piece, "Sanctions of Mass Destruction," that economic sanctions have caused more deaths than all biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in history, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That claim alone raises a sharp question: if sanctions inflict such enormous human costs, why do governments keep reaching for them? And do they even work? The answers reach back to Napoleon's Europe, run through the Cold War, and land squarely in the shadow fleets slipping oil through the Arabian Sea today.

• 2. A Tool Born of War

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  Napoleon I of France launched one of the earliest comprehensive attempts at an embargo in 1806, when he promulgated the Continental System. Its goal was to cripple the United Kingdom economically by forbidding European nations from trading with the British. The plan backfired. The French Empire could not fully enforce the ban, and the embargo proved as harmful to the continental nations involved as to Britain itself.

  By the time of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, diplomats and legal scholars were openly discussing coordinated economic pressure as a tool for enforcing international law. Latin American and Chinese international lawyers carried these ideas into reform proposals in the years before World War I. Blockades during the war itself brought sanctions from theory into practice. When the fighting ended, leaders began to see sanctions as a viable alternative to armed conflict, and the League of Nations was designed partly around that conviction.

  The League Covenant listed five specific circumstances under which sanctions could be applied, from violations of its core articles to wars launched without submitting disputes to the League Council. The Abyssinia Crisis in 1935 produced the first major test. The League imposed sanctions against Mussolini's Italy under Article 16 of the Covenant. Oil supplies, however, were not stopped; the Suez Canal remained open to Italian shipping; and the conquest of Abyssinia proceeded. The sanctions were lifted in 1936, and Italy left the League entirely in 1937.

• 3. The Numbers Behind the Debate

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  According to the Global Sanctions Data Base, 1,325 sanctions were imposed in the period 1950-2022, a span that tracks from the Cold War through to recent years. After the Cold War ended, the frequency of economic sanctions increased sharply.

  Researchers Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot examined a large body of cases in 2008 and found that regime change was the most frequent foreign-policy objective of sanctions, accounting for just over 39 percent of impositions. Their analysis concluded that 34 percent of the cases studied were successful. When scholar Robert A. Pape scrutinized their data, he found that only 5 of their reported 40 successes were actually effective, cutting the real success rate to 4 percent.

  A study by Neuenkirch and Neumeier offered more granular findings. UN sanctions reduced targeted countries' GDP growth by an average of 2.3-3.5 percent per year. In the case of comprehensive UN embargoes, the annual hit exceeded 5 percent, and the negative effects typically persisted for a decade. Unilateral US sanctions were considerably weaker, restricting GDP growth by 0.5-0.9 percent per year over an average of seven years.

  British diplomat Jeremy Greenstock offered a candid explanation for why sanctions persist despite these numbers. There is nothing else, he observed, between words and military action if you want to bring pressure upon a government. Scholar Francesco Giumelli noted a pointed irony: the type of sanctions most observers consider the most effective, namely UN sanctions against central bank assets and sovereign wealth funds, is also the type least frequently used.

• 4. Smart Sanctions and Their Limits

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  Since the mid-1990s, UN Security Council sanctions have moved away from country-wide measures toward targeting specific individuals and entities. The shift followed intense controversy over the humanitarian consequences of broader sanctions, particularly those imposed on Iraq.

  The concept of "smart sanctions" gained traction as a supposed remedy. The idea was straightforward: use asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes to squeeze political leaders and elites, while sparing ordinary civilians and neighboring countries from collateral harm. A 2016 assessment by the Targeted Sanctions Consortium found that targeted sanctions resulted in policy goals being met only 22 percent of the time.

  The record in practice has been uneven. Arms embargoes can undermine the self-defense capacity of populations under attack. Aviation bans disrupt civilian transportation and the jobs connected to it. Financial sanctions targeting specific individuals raise due process concerns. Research by Peksen found that sanctions can degrade human rights conditions inside the target country.

  The US sanctions on Russia following its 2014 annexation of Crimea illustrate one version of the collateral problem. The measures were designed to pressure Russia's financial sector, but they led American credit card companies Visa and Mastercard to suspend all transactions at sanctioned Russian banks, canceling the cards of ordinary Russian consumers. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the suspension of the SWIFT payment system pushed Russia to build its own domestic payment infrastructure, reducing its dependence on Western banking over time.

• 5. Shadow Fleets and Evasion

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  Sanctions on oil exporters have generated a sprawling workaround: dark and shadow fleets of tankers that move sanctioned crude and refined products outside regular monitoring and service networks. These vessels are most closely associated with Russian crude exports after 2022, but similar patterns have been documented involving Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.

  The terminology inside the sanctions literature draws a line between two types. "Dark fleet" tankers hide their identity. They change flag and name frequently, use complex ownership chains and front companies, falsify documentation, and switch off their Automatic Identification System transponders for extended periods. This kind of structure was first mapped in detail in a 2019 case in which US authorities seized a North Korean vessel that had been operating through layered ownership across several jurisdictions. "Grey fleet" tankers keep their AIS on, but manipulate the data, misreporting destinations or cargoes, while exploiting inconsistencies in national and international rules to appear formally compliant.

  The economic logic is straightforward. Classical work by Boulding and Becker established that price caps and embargoes on profitable goods tend to create illicit markets when the expected net return from evasion exceeds the return available under the sanctioned regime. Sanctions create a gap between the world price and the price the exporter can actually receive. If exporters can recover part of that gap by paying higher logistics and risk costs, they have a clear incentive to do so.

  Research by Cardoso et al. modeled evasion capacity as a variable that Russia could expand by investing in a larger shadow fleet and its supporting services. Their work found that tightening a price cap or shifting toward broader prohibitions does not necessarily reduce the target's income when evasion can expand at reasonable cost. By late 2023, monitoring by think-tanks and central banks indicated that many Russian crude cargoes were selling above the nominal price cap, with the incidence of sanctions appearing instead in higher bundled freight and insurance charges.

• 6. The Costs Nobody Tallies

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  Policy discussions of the shadow fleet tend to focus on revenue flows, but researchers Stockbruegger and Poussenkova et al. have argued that the more serious problem is environmental. An ageing, lightly regulated tanker pool with opaque ownership and non-standard insurance increases environmental and safety risks borne by coastal states and seafarers who had no say in the sanctions themselves.

  Legal scholars Parlov and Sverdrup contend that the combination of flags of convenience, reduced inspections, and unclear liability undermines more than five decades of work building coherent international frameworks for tanker safety, pollution control, and victim compensation. Braw and others have estimated that a major spill involving a shadow-fleet tanker in European waters could generate cleanup and compensation costs in the order of billions of US dollars, though these figures are scenario-based rather than grounded in observed accident data.

  The literature on labour conditions aboard these vessels is almost nonexistent. Existing studies treat the shadow fleet primarily as an instrument of state strategy or corporate evasion, not as a workplace. Many of the vessels are old and heavily worked, registered under flags with weak labour oversight. International labour law and human-rights obligations are mentioned in passing as potential levers but have not been explored in detail.

  Researchers Bai et al. and Poussenkova et al. point to a geographical gap in the analysis. Detailed work focuses heavily on European routes and the Baltic and North Atlantic, where political interest and media coverage are greatest. Key operational hubs lie elsewhere: ship-to-ship transfer zones in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, and Southeast Asia, and final discharge ports across Asia and the Middle East. These permissive corridors effectively set the floor for global evasion costs, and thus for the real effectiveness of sanctions.

• 7. Case Studies in Coercion

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  The US embargo against Cuba began on the 14th of March 1958, during Fidel Castro's overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Initially limited to arms sales, it expanded steadily, reaching near-total coverage of trade by the 7th of February 1962. Cuba calls it "el bloqueo," the blockade. Few US allies embraced the policy, and the embargo remains one of the longest-standing in modern history. President Barack Obama reaffirmed it in 2011, stating that without improvement in human rights and freedoms by Cuba's government, it remained in the national interest of the United States.

  Russia's sanctions on Ukraine offer a sharper illustration of coercion through energy. After Viktor Yushchenko, elected as Ukraine's third president in 2003, lobbied for NATO and EU membership, Russia demanded that Kyiv pay the same natural gas rates charged to Western European states. The price change quadrupled Ukraine's energy bill overnight. Russia cut off the gas supply in 2006, causing significant harm to both economies. Yushchenko's approval ratings fell to single digits by the 2010 election, when Viktor Yanukovych, who held a more favorable view of Moscow, won the presidency. Gas prices were then reduced substantially.

  When the Rose Revolution brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia, Russia responded with a range of economic pressure. Gazprom raised natural gas prices, and Russia banned all imports from Georgia in 2006. The ban fell particularly hard on exports of wine, citrus fruits, and mineral water. Russia also expelled nearly 2,300 Georgians who had been working inside its borders.

  The contrast with South Africa is instructive. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a voluntary international oil embargo against South Africa on the 20th of November 1987, backed by 130 countries. Nelson Mandela, asked in 1993 whether economic sanctions had helped end apartheid, replied: "Oh, there is no doubt."

• 8. What Remains Unresolved

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  The academic literature is candid about its own limits. The shadow fleet operates deliberately in opaque ways, which makes measurement difficult. Economic studies rely on partial customs data and indicative shipping information rather than reliable micro-data on insurance, ownership chains, and claims. Legal analyses of what coastal states could do under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea remain almost entirely theoretical; there is little evidence that any state has tried such measures in a sustained way.

  Research by Attia characterizes sanctions as serving more as symbolic or political devices than as genuinely costly coercive instruments. Scholar Claas Mertens found that suspending aid is more effective than adopting economic sanctions for four distinct reasons: aid suspensions benefit the imposing state economically, directly affect the targeted government's budget, are not undermined by market forces in the same way, and are less likely to provoke adverse behavioral reactions.

  The broader geopolitical consequences of the shadow fleet are barely mapped. Current analysis shows how it mitigates Western sanctions and helps Russia redirect exports toward non-coalition buyers such as China, India, and Turkey. What it does to long-term energy relationships, to the authority of the International Maritime Organization, or to the bargaining power of developing countries caught in the middle remains largely unexamined. The risk that aggressive secondary sanctions on shadow-fleet operators could generate collateral damage for developing economies is noted in the literature but not well quantified. The 4th of December 2025 was marked as the first International Day Against Unilateral Coercive Measures, a signal that the political debate around these instruments is itself still evolving.