Humanitarian Implications of Sanctions the Research Proposal

" (Jonge Oudraat, 338) This shift demonstrates a greater interest in focusing the nature of sanctions strictly on an offending action rather than in a sweeping manner which impacts the civil order of a targeted nation.

An example of use to our discussion might be North Korea, where the UN has increasingly sought sanctions that focus their attention on the equipment, technology and resource required to advance North Korea's ambition for nuclear capability. The desire to protect a public already recognized for its issues of poverty, humanitarian abuse and scarcity of resource has encouraged a shift away from methods of compellence that would seek to break the North Korean regime by popular deprivation of economic and infrastructural necessaries.

The idea of denial and deterrence sharpens the relevance of sanctions by ensuring that deprivation is felt by the regime in question rather than by the public. Even still, such policies are only marginally more effective in protecting innocents from suffering where sanctions occur.As a more general rule, sanctions promote a disengagement from nations that must more actively be included in the world community if their publics are to experience improvements in standards of living.

As the Chigas chapter denotes, NGOs are perhaps a more pragmatic way to approach the combination of needs for regime change and humanitarian improvement in the developing world. However, the authority assumed by international governing bodies such as the UN and the WTO have made it increasingly difficult for such groups to bear any sort of meaningful impact. Those these groups have the capacity to reduce humanitarian suffering, sanctions in particular tend to reduce the space within which such groups may have a meaningful impact on their intended targets.

Works Cited:

Chigas, D. (2007). Chapter 31: Capacities and Limits of NGOs as Conflict Managers Leashing the Dogs of War.

Jonge Oudraat, C. (2007). Chapter 19: Economic Sanctions and….....