Search results

Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the international community took vigorous, unprecedented steps to curb Saddam Hussein's military ambitions. The central component of these actions was a set of comprehensive arms, aviation, maritime, and economic sanctions, each imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). When the multinational coalition forces ousted Iraq from Kuwait the following year, the UNSC made these sanctions and embargoes a component of the armistice agreement. Over time, these sanctions were subsequently used as leverage to press for Iraqi compliance with relevant UNSC resolutions calling for Iraqi disarmament.¹

Marc von Boemcken is a senior researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, Germany. His areas of expertise include the international arms trade as well as the privatization of security provision.

Collective sanctions have long been a contested instrument of international politics, especially since 1990, when United States and large power use of the technique increased to the point where Richard Haass declared that a “sanctions epidemic” had emerged (Haass & O'Sullivan, 1999). Regional bodies, most notably by the European Union (EU), paralleled this trend through a dramatic increase in their own resort to sanctions (Kreutz, 2005). The imposition of sanctions by the United Nations (UN) reached the point that, in comparison to pre-1989 behavior, the 1990s were labeled “the sanctions decade” (Cortright & Lopez, 2000).