International Sanctions and Atrocity Prevention Study Notes

Administrative Announcements and Guest Lecturer Details\n* Quiz Deadlines: A quiz covering content from the previous week is due tonight. A new quiz will be released tomorrow and will be due the following Wednesday per standard procedure.\n* Guest Speaker: A guest speaker from the United Nations (UN) is scheduled for May 27. \n * The speaker has spent ten years at the UN, including time stationed in Haiti.\n * Their expertise includes conflict-related issues and conflict mitigation policies.\n * The lecture will cover the speaker's career path and the substance of their work within the UN.\n\n# Recap of Prior Theoretical Frameworks on Civilian Abuse\n* Bottom-Up Argument (Humphreys and Weinstein): This research explains differences within rebel factions regarding civilian abuse. It posits that the likelihood of abuse is shaped by the internal attributes of units and the nature of command and control within the organization.\n* Strategic Targeting by Governments (Valentino et al.): This approach views mass killing as a calculated, purposeful strategy employed by regimes. \n * Context: Most likely when regimes face guerrilla insurgencies that are gaining strength and significant civilian support.\n * Strategic Logic: The goal is to \"drain the sea to catch the fish,\" meaning the government targets the civilian base of support to counter the insurgency.\n * Last Resort: Governments typically attempt less extreme tactics first and resort to mass killing when their \"backs are against the wall.\"\n * Causation: The driving force is strategic rational weighing of costs and benefits, rather than inherent hatred or regime type.\n\n# The Logic and Mechanism of International Sanctions\n* Manipulating Incentives: If government actors are rational, international actors can influence their behavior by manipulating externally derived costs and benefits using economic levers.\n* Sanctions as Diplomacy: Sanctions are increasingly used as a tool of foreign policy. They serve three primary functions:\n 1. Relative Low Cost: They are cheaper and easier for the external state than military intervention.\n 2. Visible Costs: They impose direct costs on the regime or specific individuals responsible for atrocities.\n 3. Signaling: They signal disapproval to both domestic and international communities.\n* Mechanisms of Action:\n * Resource Depletion: Cutting off arms, freezing money, and closing access to markets to stem the resources required for violence.\n * Targeting Inner Circles: Freezing the assets or holding senior military and rebel leaders accountable to incentivize better monitoring of their units.\n * Shifting the Bargaining Range: Raising the costs of abusive policies until those costs outweigh the benefits of continuing the behavior.\n\n# Baffet and Morgan: The Multilateral vs. Unilateral Sanctions Puzzle\n* The Initial Puzzle: Policymakers strongly prefer multilateral sanctions (coalitions), yet prior research suggested that unilateral sanctions were actually more effective.\n* Theoretical Explanations for Coalition Underperformance:\n * Selection Effects: Multilateral coalitions may only form for the most difficult, high-stakes issues. Thus, they appear less effective because the problems they tackle are naturally harder to solve.\n * Free-Riding: Any member of a coalition might be tempted to \"cheat\" (e.g., trading oil on the side) to avoid the economic costs of the sanctions while still benefiting from the target's eventual behavior change.\n * Bargaining Dimensionality: In a coalition, different members want different things. This creates a complex bargaining space, allowing the target to play members against each other or off-set one demand with small concessions in another area.\n* Hypotheses Proposed by Baffet and Morgan:\n * Sanctions are more likely to be multilateral on high-salience issues.\n * Sanctions are less likely to succeed on high-salience issues.\n * Multilateral sanctions are more effective than unilateral if they are funneled through international institutions that monitor compliance and punish free-riders.\n * Multilateral sanctions are most effective when limited to a single issue or anchored in an institution to prevent side deals.\n\n# Findings and Statistical Evidence from Baffet and Morgan\n* Dataset: The authors expanded the dataset to $488$ cases, including \"low politics\" (non-security) issues to increase statistical power.\n* Correcting Former Research: They find that multilateral sanctions are generally more likely to succeed than unilateral ones, reversing earlier academic headlines.\n* Security Issues: Multilateral coalitions form more often for security disputes. These disputes are approximately $55\%$ more likely to succeed than non-security disputes, contradicting the selection effect hypothesis that they would be harder to solve.\n* The Role of Institutions:\n * Multilateral sanctions can be effective even without an institution, but effectiveness increases significantly when an institution is involved, especially for multi-issue disputes.\n * Institutions prevent senders from cutting side deals and commit the coalition to a stable set of demands.\n * Success Probability: Moving from unilateral to multilateral for a single issue shows a large increase in success probability. Moving from multilateral with multiple issues (no institution) to multiple issues (with institution) also shows a major increase.\n\n# Case Study: Applying Sanctions Theory to Myanmar\n* Context: Following the February $2021$ coup, the State Administrative Council (SAC), led by General Min Aung Hlaing, took power. The country is in a large-scale, fragmented civil war involving various ethnic groups and targeting of civilians.\n* The Sanctions Landscape: A coalition of the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has imposed sanctions with goals including ending violence, returning to civilian rule, holding elections, and releasing political prisoners.\n* Non-Sanctioning Actors: China, Russia, and India are not participating, and the UN Security Council is currently blocked from acting.\n* Strategic Regime Response (Target's Perspective): The Myanmar regime's goal is to break the coalition by \"peeling off\" member states through specific concessions:\n * Targeting the EU: The EU requires unanimity. Countries like Hungary and Slovakia are currently focused on Russia. The regime could offer humanitarian access or election observers to encourage these states to push for lifting sanctions.\n * Targeting the UK: The UK emphasizes justice for the Rohingya and ending violence. The regime might offer small concessions on Rohingya issues or justice to fracture the UK's commitment to the broader sanctions regime.\n * Targeting the US: The US seeks democracy and justice for the Rohingya but also needs rare earth minerals and leverage against China. The regime might offer the US administration access to rare earth minerals or a symbolic ceasefire to frame as a diplomatic win.\n\n# Q&A and Interactive Discussion on Strategic Concessions\n* Question (Student): Which actor is the best choice to target for a concession?\n* Response: One argued the US is the best target because an offer like a symbolic ceasefire requires effectively no long-term sacrifice from the regime while giving the US administration a guaranteed diplomatic success.\n* Discussion on EU Unity: Because the EU operates on a council that needs to be unanimous, winning over one or two states could effectively neutralize the entire EU sanctions bloc.\n* Potential Offer for the UK: A student suggested the regime could allow international organizations to distribute humanitarian aid as a concession.\n* Counter-Point on Sovereignty: The lecturer noted two reasons why a regime might resist allowing international aid access:\n 1. If aid is distributed outside regime control, it implies the regime lacks sovereignty over that territory.\n 2. International organizations often have to work with local rebel groups on the ground to deliver aid, which legitimizes the rebels.