United nations sanctions regimes and selective security

Resumen

The United Nations record of imposing sanctions in response to nuclear proliferators, (civil) wars, terrorist organizations, and coups d’état reflects a regime of selective security. Some offences have been met with sanctions under Article 41 of the UN Charter, while many similar cases were left off the hook or blocked. What is the logic behind this selectivity? Is it power politics? Humanitarianism? Democracy? Or something else? This dissertation is a scientific attempt to answer this question. It considers a total of 191 ‘sanctionable offences’ in five categories (nuclear proliferation, interstate war, civil war, terrorism, and coup d’état), sixty of which (31%) received UN sanctions. Subsequently, each offence is tested on a wide range of variables, which serve as proxies for seven hypotheses. The conclusion is that different types of offences can be explained through different hypotheses. While nuclear proliferation and interstate wars follow a straightforward logic of neorealist power politics, the UN’s sanctioning record in response to civil war reveals a logic that is much more informed by humanitarian concerns and concerns about state failure and its consequences. This is not to say that the geopolitical weight of those involved is irrelevant (it isn’t), but rather that it is an exception. Public pressure through media attention in the West can magnify these concerns in civil wars. The sanctions records in response to terrorism and coups d’état follow yet other patterns of selectivity. Sanctions on terrorist groups exclusively focus on Islamic extremism, disregarding many non-Islamic groups responsible for thousands of innocent deaths. Finally, UN sanctions after coups d’état are used as a sort of ‘democracy wild-card’ for the West, which they can play whenever convenient, but which lacks any form of coherency. This is a shame, because it is difficult to convince members to follow you if you don’t always practice what you preach.