🔎 Why this question matters

Economic sanctions are known to harm human rights (Peksen 2009; Wood 2008) and to affect democracy and leader survival (Peksen and Drury 2009, 2010; Escribà-Folch & Wright 2010; Marinov 2005). This study asks whether sanctions that specifically target segments of a regime’s leadership perform any better for human rights than conventional, country-wide sanctions.

🧾 What was analyzed: Targeted Sanctions in Africa, 1992–2008

• Dataset: Targeted Sanctions Consortium (Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho, and Hudáková 2013).
• Scope: The universe of targeted sanctions imposed on African countries between 1992 and 2008.

📊 Key findings

• Targeted sanctions produce adverse human rights effects that are not statistically distinguishable from those tied to conventional sanctions.
• Controlling for other factors, protection of rights to physical integrity (right to life and prohibition of torture) is 1.74 times more likely to worsen during an episode of targeted sanction than when no sanction is present.
• The negative effects appear to be unintended consequences of the coercive instrument rather than a deliberate policy outcome.

🧠 Proposed mechanism: A signaling explanation

• Targeted sanctions may signal that a leader is weakened.
• Opposition actors interpret that signal as an opportunity, increasing protest.
• Governments respond to rising challenges with greater repression, producing higher levels of human rights violations.

📚 Why this matters

• Targeted instruments intended to spare civilians do not automatically protect human rights and may, in practice, replicate the harms associated with conventional sanctions.
• These results have implications for policymakers choosing between sanction designs and for scholars studying the domestic political effects of coercive tools.