The West has long believed that it could educate other countries to behave appropriately, and over the past 20 years we have witnessed a rise in the use of shaming to promote international norms through diplomatic pressure and sanctions. Human rights, free markets and representative democratic systems are now routinely invoked to justify international pressure to make states comply with shared norms and values. At the same time, norm-violating states are now routinely denounced as pariahs. The problem is that sanctions do not always work. In fact, isolation and shaming may boost national pride and a country’s sense of cohesion, inadvertently helping support the regime in power. International sanctions can backfire, causing a country’s elites to band together in opposition, wearing the stigma as a badge of honor.... In some cases, such as South Africa in the 1990s, sanctions could be considered an effective strategy: Boycotts are widely thought to have contributed to the ending of South Africa’s apartheid laws. In other cases, such as present-day Iran, it may have merely helped entrench the power of the so-called enemy regimes, fortifying America’s “Great Satan” image inside Iran. Even when when it’s clearly in the country’s material interest to adhere to these imposed Western norms, as in the case of Cuba or Belarus, international shaming and sanctions often fail to work. Sometimes sanctions actually backfire and end up negatively affecting their instigators instead. - Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 10:04:38 +0000
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