The Church’s Response to Sanctions
World-wide experience with sanctions
These ideas are based on extensive studies of sanctions in many contexts done by a group in which PC(USA) participates, Lift Sanctions, Save Lives (www.liftsanctionssavelives.org), which offers a listing of key resources on the impact of economic sanctions in specific countries and more globally.
1. Overall, the results of sanctions to produce change in target governments have been meager.
a. Targeted governments often have strong resources to maintain their own power and welfare. Some individuals have clearly been constrained and harmed, but the government itself and its most important leaders have generally maintained their position of power.
b. Targeted governments have often found ways of meeting their most urgent needs through surreptitious sources, often strengthening ties with non-sanctioning countries.
c. Targeted governments have used the sanctions as explanation/excuse for hardships in their countries. Among their followers, the strength of the governments was not diminished.
2. The burdens of sanctions have fallen most heavily on the populace of the country being sanctioned, not the governments or their leaders. When food is in short supply in authoritarian countries, priority goes to those with guns.
a. Shortages are global in the target country; inflation affects all; corrosion of the financial system affects everyone; economic contraction means widespread unemployment; shortage of public funds weakens any public sector safety nets. All of these are inevitably true.
b. “Humanitarian exclusions” in the implementation of sanctions are cumbersome and incomplete in their coverage. They do not deal with the broader issues listed above.
3. The underlying goal of sanctions is generally the overthrow of the government of the target country (although this goal sometimes leaves open the possibility of escape from sanctions, if basic policies are modified).
a. International law leaves it highly questionable whether it is legal for one country to seek to bring about the overthrow of the government of another country, or to insist that they change fundamental policies.
b. The country most active in imposing international sanctions has been the United States. Many other countries have followed suit only under threat that otherwise they would themselves be sanctioned. This has not made us popular in the rest of the world.