Do international sanctions actually work?

This was the title of the recent Spring Meeting of the Royal Netherlands Society for International Law (KNVIR) with guests Professor Peter van Bergeijk from the International Institute of Social Studies and Professor Larissa van den Herik from Leiden University.

In his lecture, Peter van Bergeijk discussed the five key facts that repeatedly pop up in discussions about the appropriateness of sanctions:

• the increasing use of economic sanctions since 2010
• the relative high success rate of comprehensive sanctions and the high failure rate of targeted sanctions
• the failure of symbolic sanctions
• the slowness and weakness of EU sanctions, and
• the modest global costs of a new ‘cold trade war’

Watch the lecture

You can watch van Bergeijk's lecture and that of Professor van den Herik on the KNVIR website