Sanctions: How successful are they?, by Paul Reynolds , World affairs correspondent, BBC News
Sanctions sometimes have the appearance of being more about making those who impose them feel better than making those at whom they are aimed change their minds.
It’s easy to pick a few cases and talk about them (a few out of roughly 900 recorded cases of threatened or imposed sanctions between 1970-2000: http://www.unc.edu/~bapat/TIES.htm), but that doesn’t supply evidence whether sanctions “work” or not. Nikolay Marinov gives good evidence that they actually do: “Do Economic Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders?”, American Journal of Political Science, 2005 (an earlier version is available here: http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Envm4/replicate/replicate.htm)
On a methodologically deeper level, we can also argue (and Dan Drezner has supplied evidence for this in his “The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion”) that the most effective sanctions never see daylight as the mere threat of them should impel the target state to concede when the threat is made. By picking cases of implemented sanctions, you step into a selection effect.
This is a tricky subject, but I think that the BBC reporter is on to something — most advocates of sanctions are more concerned with how they appear than with whether the sanction will have an impact beyond their self-image.
More sanctions stuff: http://www.econlib.org/Library/Enc/Sanctions.html
The question of whether sanctions bring about positive effects is an important one. I am a skeptic, but wiling to look at evidence, but only if it includes the impact of sanctions on increasing the strength of the grip of the rulers, which was arguably the case in some prominent cases, such as Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq and Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba, both of whom were strengthened by the sanctions regimes.