UN targeted sanctions datasets (1991–2013)

Abstract

Targeted sanctions are increasingly used by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to address major challenges to international peace and security. Unlike other sanctions, those imposed by the UN are universally binding and relied upon as a basis for legitimating both unilateral and regional sanctions measures. Encompassing a wide range of individual, diplomatic, financial, and sectoral measures, targeted sanctions allow senders to target a specific individual, corporate entity, region, or sector, helping to minimize the negative effects of sanctions on wider populations. This article introduces the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC) quantitative and qualitative datasets, which encompass all UN targeted sanctions imposed between 1991 and 2013, or 23 different country regimes broken into 63 case episodes for comparative analysis. Adding to existing datasets on sanctions (HSE, TIES), these new, closely interrelated datasets enable scholars using both quantitative and qualitative methods to: (1) differentiate among different purposes, types of sanctions, and target populations, (2) assess the scope of different combinations of targeted measures, (3) access extensive details about UN sanctions applied since the end of the Cold War, and (4) analyze changing dynamics within sanctions regimes over time in ways other datasets do not. The two TSC datasets assess UN targeted sanctions as effective 22% of the time and describe major aspects of UN targeted sanctions regimes, including the types of sanctions, their purposes and targets, impacts, relationships with other institutions, sanctions regimes, and policy instruments, mechanisms of coping and evasion, and unintended consequences.