Smart Sanctions: The Next Steps

Sanctions are the strongest non-military instruments available to the United Nations to enforce international law, peace and security. More than a dozen sanctions regimes were imposed in the 1990s, but these often had undesired side-effects on the population of the target countries – particularly in the case of Iraq – on the one hand, and suffered from weak implementation on the other. At the request of the German Foreign Office and in cooperation with the UN Secretariat, the Bonn International Center for Conversion organized two major conferences and a number of working group meetings to collect and elaborate suggestions for improvements in arms embargoes and travel sanctions in particular. The volume documents this "Bonn-Berlin Process”. It contains contributions by a number of international experts from research institutions, governments and the UN, as well as summaries of the discussions that took place. The relevance of this issue and the breadth of experience of the authors put this volume at the center of the current debate on ‘smart sanctions’ and make it a valuable contribution to the more general discussion on the role of the UN in international politics.