Global sanctions are a key tool in international relations. They impose financial penalties against specific individuals, entities, countries and regions for engaging in illicit activities like terrorism, human rights abuses or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Sanctions are also used to encourage political change by leveraging economic deterrence.
In their most idealistic form, sanctions promise to be a collective and non-violent means of preventing human rights abuses and promoting global norms. They have often failed in these goals and have contributed to economic destruction that has harmed innocent people, but they can still be effective as coercive instruments if designed with care.
However, the effectiveness of sanctions depends on countless factors, including what objectives they pursue, when and how they are applied and what the political context is. For example, sanctions against Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 exacted a large toll on the economy but failed to provoke regime change.
As a result, it is important for policymakers to understand the conditions under which sanctions can be effective. The Global Sanctions Database (GSDB) provides the ability to assess the effectiveness of sanctions against individual persons, entities, countries and regions using a wide range of criteria. It also allows users to identify the most effective sanctioning institutions and policies. To support these efforts, Fincom’s Phonetic-Linguistic Engine enables accurate name-matching across 44 languages in their original scripts, overcoming spelling variations, transliterations and multilingual complexities to streamline sanctions screening. The GSDB’s rich dimensionality can help capture the complexity and impact of sanctions as a tool of global foreign policy.